Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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he could see no professional alternative are all likely factors in his decision to

commit himself to what at that point was hardly a promising cause. In

addition we see a character trait emerging that was to manifest itself

repeatedly in Himmler’s political life: failure led him neither to give up

nor to turn back, but rather to redouble his efforts in pursuing the goal he

had set himself, even if he was to learn to do this in a very ﬂexible manner

that corresponded to the power relations at the time. It was precisely these

features of his personality that made him persevere with the NSDAP in the

coming lean years and made him appear suitable for a ‘soldierly’ role within

the party’s paramilitary activities. After a few years as a rural agitator and

then as a low-ranking ofﬁcial in the Munich Party Ofﬁce, and still under the

wing of his mentor Gregor Strasser, in 1927 he became deputy Reichsfu

hrer

of the protection squads, who acted as bodyguards to party members. From

the perspective of the party leadership it made sense to place the organiza-

tion of speaking engagements by prominent party members (for which

Himmler, as deputy Reich propaganda chief, was responsible) and their

protection in the same hands. Although up to this point he had frequently

failed to make a good impression, it was in this position that he ﬁnally

showed what he could do, and at the beginning of 1929 the leadership of the

still fairly insigniﬁcant SS fell into his lap.

Himmler now set about building up the SS, which at the point when he

took it over comprised only a few hundred members, into the National

Socialist movement’s second paramilitary organization. He was helped in

this by the long-standing conﬂict between the party leadership and the SA,

which erupted twice, in the summer of 1930 and the spring of 1931, into

revolts, above all on the part of the Berlin SA. On both occasions Himmler

placed the SS at the party’s disposal as a reliable means of protection.

Though the SS remained subordinate to the SA leadership under Ro

hm,

his old mentor, Himmler was nevertheless successful in making the SS stand

out as clearly distinct from the SA. His SS was more disciplined, did not

provoke the party, and, by contrast with the rufﬁans in the SA, saw itself as

an elite, a feature that manifested itself not least in what purported to be

racial criteria for acceptance and permission to marry. Himmler regarded

the SS as the racial vanguard for future ‘Blood and Soil’ policies, a claim

he strengthened through his alliance with Richard Walther Darre

, the

party’s agrarian expert and settlement ideologue. In contrast to the ideal of

rough, unfettered masculinity propagated by the SA, Himmler advanced the

deliberately ‘soldierly’ image of the SS man, who should, if possible, be head

740 conclusion

of a clan (Sippe) with many children. Himmler’s own new orientation is

reﬂected in this: in 1927 the man who had been a ‘lonely freebooter’

entered into a relationship with Margatete Boden, seven years his senior,

and married her in 1928.In1929 their only child was born.

As this survey of Himmler’s development in his ‘formative years’ reveals,

the familiar cliche

s about his personality do indeed accurately reﬂect speciﬁc

characteristics visible in the Reichsfu

hrer. His contemporaries frequently

thought him impassive, cold, and pedantic. Constantly striving to keep his

emotions at a distance and his lack of self-conﬁdence under control,

Himmler conducted his relations with others in a manner that was

organized down to the smallest detail, and thus made the impression of

being insipid and impersonal. He attempted to compensate for the emo-

tional void he felt by taking refuge in utopian dreams and quasi-religious

speculations, which in turn were regarded by his contemporaries either as

‘romantic’ or simply as crackpot. Himmler never got too carried away with

such daydreams, however; rather, as his ﬁrst years as Reichsfu

hrer-SS

showed, he was able to combine ideological ﬂights of fancy with power

politics in a an effective manner and to exploit the political power-struggles

in the NSDAP for his own purposes, an indication of the extreme utilitarian

outlook he had adopted in general. Anything useful to him was permissable.

The fact that he did not shy away from violence in the process may not be

surprising in the light of his biography. From the outbreak of the First

World War Himmler believed himself to be in a military conﬂict. After

experiencing the war for three-and-a-half years from the everyday stand-

point of the home front, he had joined the Bavarian army at the beginning

of 1918 at the age of 17 and from that time on had moved permanently in

circles dominated by the military and by violence. He regarded the turbu-

lent post-war years merely as a continuation of the war and as a chance now

to triumph over the enemy within. After the failed putsch he survived by

sheltering in the paramilitary environment fostered by right-wing radical-

ism. As Reichsfu

hrer-SS he then regarded himself as a commander in a civil

war in which the use of any kind of violence, including political assassina-

tion, was permitted.

Himmler assumed the leadership of the SS at a time when Nazism was on

the point of rapidly becoming a mass movement, and he was inevitably

drawn into the maelstrom of its galloping expansion: in the space of about

four years his SS grew to 50,000 members. To make sense of Himmler’s

conclusion 741

development from this time it is therefore necessary to trace it with close

reference to the history of Nazism as a whole, a history that can be described

as the rapid succession of dynamic processes: the conquest, extension, and

assertion of power, expansion, racial war of annihilation, and ﬁnally pro-

gressive self-destruction. Himmler the politician was inextricably bound up

in this welter of historical developments; a purely biographical explanation

of his political activity would therefore be totally inadequate. We are

dealing here with complex political events that cannot be reduced to the

psychology of the individual actors.

If, however, Himmler’s career is reconstructed in detail, it becomes

evident to what extent he imprinted his personality on his various ofﬁces.

One example of this is his idiosyncratic style of leadership, which encom-

passed the private lives of his men and their families. Himmler saw his role as

that of the educator of his SS, as a father-ﬁgure. The ‘compliance’ that had

bound him to his parents was something he now demanded of his SS

leaders; he could act out his voyeuristic and manipulative tendencies by

snooping into their private affairs. At the same time he was at pains to

extend his ‘soldierly’ self-image to the SS as a whole. Members of the SS

were not to bond as mates but to submit to an iron discipline and employ

the same reserved and sober social forms behind which Himmler concealed

his own lack of social ease.

And if he expressly made the claim that in everything it did his SS was

guided by particular moral principles, and in formulaic fashion repeatedly

held up an obligatory SS ‘catalogue of virtues’, then there is an unmistakable

link to features that deﬁne his personality. At the beginning of their

relationship he had conﬁded to his ﬁance

e that he wished he could for

once be allowed not to be ‘decent’ (ansta

ndig) and to remove the straitjacket

of rules, maxims of conduct, and self-control. The SS was to supply him

with plentiful opportunities for doing just that. In order to paper over the

contradiction between high moral claims and obscure temptations, howev-

er, the fac¸ade of virtue and constant concern for ‘decency’ had to be

maintained to outward appearances at all costs; this double standard was a

feature of Himmler the man as well as of his SS.

Himmler’s attempts, by means of a special SS cult, to guarantee the

cohesion of the ‘order’ and to strengthen its elite character as keeper of

the Holy Grail of Nazism similarly reveal his personal weaknesses. Himmler

himself needed symbols and insignia, myths and shrines, festivals and rituals,

both to orientate himself as well as to give sensuous expression to his fantasy

742 conclusion

world and to be able to share it with others, even if imperfectly. The

peculiar primness and artiﬁciality of this cult, in which Himmler was

constantly playing the role of master of ceremonies, provided an uncon-

scious illustration of his inhibited personality.

Gradually the personality and the ofﬁce became one. Private life and

career became increasingly interlinked: his brothers and friends joined the

SS, while Himmler treated SS members like members of his own family.

Unbidden, he made their family life, their health, their private debts, and

their alcohol consumption his business. And when he was considering

breaking free of his now-unsatisfying marriage and forming a new attach-

ment, he recommended ‘second marriages’ to his men and the fathering of

illegitimate children.

Above all, his position in the Nazi state seemed to open up to him the

opportunity of transforming dreams and ambitions that had long enthused

him in private into political reality on a grand scale: liberation from the

chains of the Christian religion and the rejection of restricting moral

obligations; the re-evaluation of procreation and marriage from the point

of view of racial breeding and selection; a career as an ofﬁcer and army

commander; the creation of an ideology that would be an adequate substi-

tute for religion; ﬁnally, the restoration of a lost Germanic world, and in

particular the radical extirpation of the hated ‘subhumans’ as the prerequisite

for the realization of this utopia.

In this way, and over time, he created a position of power geared

completely to himself personally and deﬁned by his speciﬁc predilections

and peculiarities. Himmler was the complete opposite of a faceless func-

tionary or bureaucrat, interchangeable with any other. The position he built

up over the years can instead be described as an extreme example of the

almost total personalization of political power. This phenomenon can be

explained only by means of the speciﬁc power structures in Nazism and

their dynamic: leadership by a charismatic Fu

hrer, the absence in this system

of law and regulations, the permanent pressure to adapt power structures to

altered political goals—these resulted in a situation where large parts of the

apparatus of power were indeed linked directly to the ‘Fu

hrer’ by means of

tasks and responsibilities that had been designed with speciﬁc people in

mind, but these conﬁdants of Hitler had extraordinary freedom of action in

the discharge of these responsibilities.

In Himmler’s case, a series of relatively distinct phases in his political

career can be discerned, in each of which the R

eichsfu

hrer set out a speciﬁc

conclusion 743

vision of the SS. In so doing he was reacting to the processes of change

affecting the regime and was contributing also to those changes: he was,

however, unable to direct or control them entirely.

In 1933 he at ﬁrst had to content himself with the post of Chief of the

Political Police in Bavaria. By exploiting, among other things, the mount-

ing conﬂict between the party and state leadership on the one hand and the

SA on the other, and recommending himself to the former as a reliable ally,

he was able within a relatively short time to propel himself upwards to the

post of Chief of the Political Police in the other German states and ﬁnally in

the entire Reich. The successful liquidation of the SA leadership—his

erstwhile mentors Ro

hm and Strasser fell victim to it—was to strengthen

considerably the position of his SS and remove any doubts about his loyalty

to Hitler. From this position he developed a comprehensive programme for

the leadership of the police as a whole, which after Hitler had appointed him

Chief of the German Police in 1936 he intended to amalgamate with the SS

to form a ‘state protection corps’.

When, at the end of the 1930s, the Third Reich moved to expand, he

redeﬁned his goals: Alongside settlement and ‘racial selection’ of the popu-

lation in the territories ‘to be Germanized’, he expanded the Waffen-SS,

deployed it as part of the policy of repression in the occupied territories, and

introduced a policy of systematic, racially based mass murder. In the period

1938–40, however, he not only gained a string of new responsibilities but

had to accept several painful defeats and setbacks. Among them were his

failure in the Fritsch crisis and the criticism from the Wehrmacht he was

forced to suffer on account of SS atrocities in Poland and of his so-called

‘procreation order’; in the newly conquered countries of northern and

western Europe he was not able to be as effective everywhere as he had

imagined, and in occupied Poland his massive resettlement programme had

ground to a halt.

With the invasion of the Soviet Union he hoped he would be able to

leave this period of stagnation behind. In the summer of 1941 it was

unequivocally Himmler who seized the initiative to extend the executions

already being carried out by his Einsatzgruppen and other murder squads of

‘suspect’ Jews in the Soviet Union to a blanket genocide of the Jewish

minority in the occupied eastern territories. In doing so he was convinced

that he was acting in harmony with Hitler’s long-term plans. This initiative

was Himmler’s response to a further defeat: his marginalization with regard

to occupation policy in the east, which he had heard about in mid-July. By

744 conclusion

now employing the police powers he enjoyed for the purpose of geno-

cide—and this was his calculation—he secured for himself and his SS the

much more wide-ranging task of subjecting the conquered territories to a

gigantic programme of deportation, resettlement, and extermination. From

his perspective the murder of the Jews was only the ﬁrst step towards a much

more extensive ‘new order’ based on racist criteria.

In the autumn and winter of 1941 Himmler played a key role in the

intensiﬁcation of the persecution of the Jews, that is, in the preparation of

the ﬁrst waves of deportations and the inclusion of additional territories in

eastern Europe in the extermination programme. Behind this too were

considerations that went far beyond the ‘elimination’ of the Jews: at the

height of the Nazi politics of conquest he replaced the notion of a ‘Ger-

manic’ Reich with the vision of a ‘Greater Germanic’ Empire.

In the spring of 1942 it seemed to him that the moment had arrived when

he could ﬁnally achieve a breakthrough for this aim: he saw an opportunity

of extending the Holocaust to more and more groups of Jewish victims.

First the whole of occupied Poland was caught up in the whirlwind of mass

extermination, followed by—and the assassination of Heydrich clearly

played an important part in this—the rest of the European countries. By

September 1942, immediately after these fundamental decisions taken main-

ly between April and June 1942, he set the course of a development that,

seen in its totality, amounted to nothing less than the creation of a new

order on the European continent under SS leadership. This was made

possible by his linking together a number of diverse tasks: he took over

responsibility for ‘combating bandits’ in the occupied territories, had a

complete settlement plan drawn up for the territory under German domi-

nation, constantly expanded the Waffen-SS’s recruitment opportunities,

concerned himself with the integration of the ‘Germanic countries’ into

the new Reich, planned to build up his own arms business, tackled the

systematic removal of ‘asocial’ elements, and, under the banner of ‘extermi-

nation through labour’, ensured the expansion of the concentration-camp

system.

From Himmler’s perspective the sequence of brilliant military victories

won by the Wehrmacht from 1939 onwards was like a time-lapse, making

the span of several generations that he had hitherto estimated as being

necessary to establish a Greater Germanic Reich drastically shrink: in 1942

there seemed to him a window allowing him and his SS to turn ideas that

had up to then been regarded as utopian into reality. What looked from his

conclusion 745

standpoint like a huge acceleration of historical processes and the entirely

justiﬁed expectation of turning utopian dreams into reality in a very short

time seems to me an absolutely decisive factor in explaining his actions in

implementing the ‘Final Solution’ and organizing gigantomaniacal ‘plans for

a new order’. Up to this point he had, in his own estimation, been

ultimately successful with almost everything he had tackled. Nothing and

nobody seemed capable of stopping him.

Yet very shortly after this, at the end of 1942, came the turn in the war,

and Himmler was forced to put his extensive plans on hold. If one examines

more closely the diverse projects to which he had given powerful impetus,

most in any case ran aground fairly swiftly: his projects for new settlements

were inadequately carried out or ended in a ﬁasco; his plan to build bridge-

heads in the ‘Germanic countries’ by forming alliances with local leaders and

agencies willing to collaborate was largely unsuccessful; his own arms

business never materialized; the ‘combating of bandits’ turned out to be a

hopeless endeavour; the large-scale recruitment of ethnic Germans into the

Waffen-SS weakened the position of German minorities in south-eastern

Europe, and the recruitment of volunteers from ‘alien nations’ to the

Waffen-SS had mainly negative results.

Now he concentrated fully on what had always represented the core of

his power: the exercise of violence and terror, with the help of which he

now intended to guarantee the ‘security’ of the territory still dominated by

Nazi Germany. By taking on further ofﬁces, in particular that of Reich

Minister of the Interior and commander of the Reserve Army, towards the

end of the war he to all intents and purposes united in his own person all the

instruments of violence belonging to the Nazi state.

Nevertheless, he was unable to stop resistance movements in the occu-

pied territories, nor is there evidence to suggest that he had developed even

the beginnings of a coherent idea of how to do so. The situation in

Germany itself was, however, different: up to the military capitulation in

May 1945 he was largely successful in what he had set himself in 1937 as his

chief task in the event of a new war, namely, to cover the regime’s back in

the ‘internal theatre of war’ inside Germany. The fact that the Third Reich

did not collapse from within but only under the force of the Allied armies—

a prolongation of its existence that cost millions of lives—really was to a

considerable extent the work of Heinrich Himmler.

In the ﬁnal phase of the war Himmler tried for the very last time to

redeﬁne his role in the Third Reich: as an honest broker, who, acting from

746 conclusion

allegedly humanitarian motives, was opening up the way for peace. He

made efforts to establish contacts with the western Allies via neutral states,

offering in the process the possibility of exchanging concentration-camp

prisoners and even seeking to contact Jewish organizations—an absurd

course of action that possibly underlines his tendency to indulge political

illusions as much as his striving to adjust to whatever circumstances he found

himself in. When these efforts failed and Hitler repudiated him in the ﬁnal

days of the war he took refuge in hectic activity, without ﬁnding anything

with which to counter his inner or outer collapse.

What is remarkable in all this is above all Himmler’s ability, in the course of

the Nazi dictatorship, on the one hand to create all-embracing plans for the

power complex he controlled, and on the other to allocate to the individual

component organizations of his empire tasks connected with the realization

of these plans that, from the regime’s perspective, not only made sense

ideologically and in terms of power politics, but also gave the impression of

forming a coherent whole. Although he was extremely careful in each

individual case to obtain Hitler’s conﬁrmation of any new powers, he was

nevertheless the one who was able to combine these separate powers

tactically into a system. In this way he made successive additions to his

areas of responsibility, until ﬁnally, at the end of the war, he was probably

the most powerful Nazi politician after Hitler.

And yet Himmler’s career cannot be interpreted one-sidedly in terms of a

continuous and persistent process of realizing existing ideological tenets.

Although a particular theme—the refrain of the eternal struggle of ‘Ger-

manic’ heroes against ‘Asiatic’ subhumans—runs through his mind and

actions, this way of seeing the world was so general and vague that he

could adapt it to ﬁt any political situation. This ability to combine ideology

ﬂexibly with power politics was his real strength.

It should ﬁnally be emphasized that Nazi policy took its particular

explosiveness and dynamic to a considerable extent from the manner in

which Heinrich Himmler brought together the police, the camp system,

racial selection, settlement policy, combating of partisans, forced-labour

programmes, and the mobilization of ‘Teutons’ and ‘ethnic Germans’.

From this an SS and police complex arose, the internal coherence and full

scope of which can be understood only if the person who united all these

powers is taken into account. If Himmler had been replaced in the 1930 sby

someone else, this speciﬁc and highly dangerous network of different

conclusion 747

powers would not have come into being. If, on the other hand, these

responsibilities had been distributed among several Nazi politicians as sepa-

rate domains, Nazi policy could not have led to its dreadful consequences in

quite the same way.

If we consider Himmler’s empire and the plans and utopian fantasies he

developed in their entirety, it is also evident that he had amassed a potential

for destruction that far exceeded the catastrophes that Nazism itself actually

caused: for the systematic murder of the European Jews, with which above

all the name Himmler is connected today, was not in his eyes the ultimate

goal of his policies but rather the precondition for much more extensive

plans for a bloody ‘new ordering’ of the European continent.

748 conclusion

Endnotes

prologue

1. Himmler and his companions were apprehended by two freed Soviet POWs

who were deployed to reinforce a British patrol; see ‘Die letzten Tage von

Heinrich Himmler. Neue Dokumente aus dem Archiv des Fo

deralen Sicher-

heitsdienstes’, presented and with an introduction by Boris Chavkin and

A. M. Kalganov, in Forum fu

r osteuropa

ische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte, 4 (2000),

251–84.

2. On Himmler’s time in Camp 31 see the report Selvester wrote in 1963 at the

request of the Himmler biographers Roger Manvell und Heinrich Fraenkel,

who subsequently used it in their biography (Himmler: Kleinbu

rger und Massen-

rder (Herrsching, 1981), 227 ff.). Before passing the report on to Manvell and

Fraenkel, Selvester sent it for approval to the Public Relations Department of the

War Ofﬁce. The paragraph on the plan to drug Himmler (PRO, WO 32/19603)

was crossed out. Written almost twenty years after the event, the report contains

a number of inaccuracies, particularly with regard to the chronological sequence

of events, as is clear from a comparison with the report writt en on 23 May 1945

by Smith, the chief interrogating ofﬁcer, and the 2nd British Army communi-

cation concerning the events dated 24 May 1945. All these documents are in

PRO, WO 208/4431.

3.PRO, WO 208/4431, War Diary, Second Army Defence Company, 23 May

1945.

4. Ibid. War Diary, 26 May 1945. On the location of the grave see further

correspondence in this ﬁle.

chapter 1

1. Letters in the Su

ddeutsche Zeitung of 9/10 August 1980.

2. Ibid.

3. BAK, NL 1126/26 , Family tree of the Kiene family created by Gebhard

Himmler, September 1921. Agathe Kiene lived from 1833 till 1916.Onthe

family history of the Himmlers see Bradley F. Smith, Heinrich Himmler

1900–1926. Sein Weg in den deutschen Faschismus (Munich, 1979), 23 ff.