Hitler's Foreign Executioners (5 page)

Part Three opens in the summer of 1944, when Himmler’s SS was a militarised state within a state that had been bloated by its recruitment of non-Germans. Despite calamitous military reversals on every front, Himmler continued to think in terms of a Greater Germanic Empire – defended by a pan-Germanic army, toughened by combat and zealous mass murder. Himmler had begun to think ‘beyond Hitler’. The image of Himmler, memorably set out not long after the war ended by Hugh Trevor-Roper in
The Last Days of Hitler
as the Führer’s most loyal paladin and, in his own mind at least, heir apparent, has rarely been questioned. In the final part of this book, I suggest a more complex if not completely contradictory interpretation. For Himmler, loyalty was a brand – a means to ascend in the treacherous world of Hitler’s court and to fix the corporate identity of the SS. Affirming loyalty may well have been a psychological necessity for this enigmatic bureaucrat, but Himmler knew that any overt challenge to Hitler would have led to catastrophe. In a succession of barely perceivable steps, Himmler’s ambition began to outstrip Hitler’s. His covert master plan was grounded in an elastic pseudoscientific logic that however lunatic it now appears, inspired a future vision that left the Nazi Party and its leader far behind. ‘Germanisation’ implied both a massive destruction of life alongside the co-option of suitable non-Germans as the dog soldiers of conquest and occupation. For Hitler, war was a means to extract living space in Eastern Europe and impose German hegemony. For Himmler, it was merely the prelude to the ethnic transformation of Eurasia as a Nordic empire.

In March 1945, as the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ collapsed under Allied hammer blows, these two very different visions finally collided. Hitler excommunicated Himmler and sentenced him to death. The final break was provoked by news of Himmler’s futile contacts with the Allies. But the fuse had been lit years before, and then burned silently out of sight until the downfall of the Reich. The ‘loyal Heinrich’ was no more. But Himmler had little time to enjoy a world without Hitler. Spurned by the provisional new government of Admiral Karl Dönitz, he wandered aimlessly through northern Germany. At the end of May 1945, Himmler, disguised as an officer in the Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Military Police), was captured by a British army unit. His last reported words, before biting on a cyanide pill concealed in his mouth, were ‘I am Heinrich Himmler’.

On 22 August 1939 Adolf Hitler summoned the German army high command to his southern headquarters in the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof, near Berchtesgaden. The generals and their adjutants tramped past the massed cactus plants in the entrance and assembled in the Great Hall, dominated by a giant globe and vast picture window that looked out towards Austria, now absorbed by the Reich. In his study here, Hitler spent many hours sipping tea and gazing at the rocky flanks of Untersberg Mountain where according to legend the red-bearded German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, lies entombed, awaiting a wake-up call to rescue Germany in its hour of need. Hitler would attach Barbarossa’s name to the invasion of Russia in June 1941. He should perhaps have recalled that the German emperor had not perished in battle with the infidel, but had drowned while bathing in an Armenian river.

The German top brass had come to hammer out the objectives of Fall Weiß (Case White), the plan for the invasion of Poland.
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Against the dazzling background of the Bavarian Alps, Hitler unveiled a dizzying vision of conquest. He informed his generals that German relations with Poland had reached a political nadir. Polish provocation was ‘unbearable’ – the only solution was the literal destruction of the Polish nation. This meant that the success of Case White depended on waging a new kind of warfare. Germany, Hitler insisted, would not only be asserting its alleged historic rights to the Polish lands – ‘an extension of our living space in
the East’. The task of the German armed forces would be to eliminate a ‘mortal enemy’ of the German Reich: the Polish elite. Hitler clarified what he meant by this: Poland’s ‘vital forces’ (
lebendige Kräfte
) must be liquidated: ‘It is not a question of reaching a specific line or new frontier, but rather the annihilation of the enemy, which must be pursued in ever new ways.’
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Hitler’s language left no room for ambiguity: ‘Proceed brutally. 80 million people [i.e. Germans] must get what is rightfully theirs.’ At a later meeting he hammered home ‘there must be no Polish leaders, where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh that sounds’.
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According to his diary account of the earlier meeting, German Army General Franz Halder eagerly concurred: ‘Poland must not only be struck down, but liquidated as quickly as possible.’ The Prussian elite relished this new opportunity to smash the hated Poles who all too often had risen from the ashes of defeat. Now they would be finished off once and for all. Hitler and his generals conceived the Polish campaign as a ‘war of liquidation’. Poland would not simply be conquered but destroyed. ‘Have no pity!’ Hitler insisted. Wehrmacht generals like Halder often used words like ‘liquidation’ and evidently had few misgivings about the ‘physical annihilation of the Polish population’.

Prussian military doctrine had long demanded ‘absolute destruction’ of the enemy’s fighting forces (‘bleeding the French white’ in 1871), as well as the punitive treatment of enemy culture and civilians. But Hitler’s new war strategy insisted on unprecedented ‘harshness’. The problem for his generals was not a moral but a practical one. In purely military terms, liquidation of a nation’s ‘vital forces’ was time consuming and necessarily meant diverting troops from ‘Zones of Operations and Rear Areas’. SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and his oleaginous deputy SD head Reinhard Heydrich realised that Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’ offered astonishing opportunities. The SS would assume responsibility for liquidation, security and ‘mopping-up’ operations, meaning mass executions – onerous tasks best handled by specialised militias that the SS could readily supply. In return, Himmler would demand an ever expanding share of the political and material rewards of occupation.

The Polish campaign of 1939 would provide Himmler with a breakthrough opportunity to transform the SS into the vanguard force of this new kind of war. The destruction of Poland would begin laying the foundations of an embryonic plan to remould the ethnic map of Europe. Although the Germans would deploy few non-German troops in Poland, the war applied SS doctrine for the first time to actual military practice. To understand Himmler’s vision of modern racial war, we need to look at the way the destruction of Poland forged the radical ideology of Hitler’s ‘political soldiers’.

SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was notoriously inscrutable. The dutiful son of a reactionary Bavarian schoolmaster, he had missed out on martial glory in the First World War and been educated as an agronomist. He seemed to enemies and friends alike as Sphinx-like but unexceptional, with the manners of a fussy schoolmaster, a plodding pedant obsessed by homeopathic remedies and oddball pseudoscientific fantasies. But this cold-hearted crank transformed Hitler’s bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel, into a ‘state within a state’ that directly managed the plunder of occupied Europe and the slaughter of millions. Psychological analysis of the ‘architect of genocide’ has generally spawned the most banal speculation; there can be no doubt that loyalty and devotion were at the heart of Himmler’s self-image and his relationship to Hitler. Hitler’s craving for dog-like devotion from acolytes like Rudolf Hess is well attested. From the very beginning of his political ascent, he adroitly manipulated rival courtiers who felt obliged to continually reaffirm their devotion. Thanks to his father’s assiduous cultivation of the Bavarian royal family, Himmler had developed refined skills as a disciple. He understood from very early on that the frequent affirmation of loyalty was the road to power in Hitler’s competitive and treacherous court. For Himmler, such devotion was both a psychological need and a vital, thoroughly honed political skill. Hitler rewarded him with a much repeated soubriquet ‘the loyal Heinrich’ – which implies that he stood out from even his most sycophantic peers. And Himmler insisted that loyalty became the hallmark of SS ideology.

Himmler was a highly competent organiser and manager. Like Stalin, he made himself master of the card index file. No detail was too trifling. Himmler knew everything about everybody who mattered. He liked to deliver pompous homilies on the black art of political manipulation and fervently believed that the acquisition of power was a conspiratorial skill practised by ‘wire pullers’. As ‘loyal Heinrich’, the manipulative Himmler put these insights to good use. The Baltic German Felix Kersten, who became Himmler’s masseur and confidante, was surely right when he called his master a ‘crass rationalist coldly taking human instincts into account and using them to his own ends’.
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Although Himmler presented himself as ‘loyal Heinrich’, and evidently derived satisfaction from seeming dutiful, loyalty was a means to an end – one that would serve him very well in the slippery world of Hitler’s court.

Unlike Hitler and many of the Nazi elite, Himmler had never experienced active service on the front line. This humiliating failure seems to have provoked
in him a perverse need to embrace violence as an abstract human quality – one that profoundly shaped his world view. The Germanic or Nordic race, he believed from very early on, possessed a natural right to domination, but this racial privilege was resented and threatened by Jews and ‘Asiatic’ peoples. This antagonism could only be resolved through bloodshed. In January 1929 Hitler appointed Himmler Reichsführer-SS in charge of his personal bodyguards, the Schutzstaffel. This insignificant ‘Gruppe’ could muster just 280 men when Himmler received his appointment, but he seems to have grasped its potential very quickly. The rapid expansion of the SS is well documented. By the time Hitler seized power in 1933, membership had expanded to more than 50,000. Even more significant than these numbers was Himmler’s understanding of brand and corporate identity. Drawing on very diverse models such as the Knights Templar, the Order of Jesuits as well as Italian Black Shirts, Himmler fashioned a distinctive paramilitary elite, replete with oaths and slogans, that was avowedly aristocratic. The SS that emerged after 1933 would spawn numerous agencies, militias and pseudo-academies like the Ahnenerbe, all dedicated to a radical refashioning of German imperialism. Himmler forged a political apparatus designed to enforce security on the Home Front and on the frontiers of an expanding imperial domain.

Hitler never sanctioned such profligate ambition. He could not afford to allow a single individual or agency to acquire hegemonic power. The Nazi state has often been viewed as an embattled arena in which highly aggressive power-brokers continuously jostled for favour and power. Hitler frequently handed the same apparently sovereign power to more than one of his paladins. After 1941, for example, the Reich Commissar of Ukraine, the notoriously brutal Erich Koch, waged war on his nominal superior, the ‘Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories’ Alfred Rosenberg. For Hitler, this wasteful duplication of powers was strategic. It allowed him to dominate squabbling competitors who would win or lose according to laws that mimicked the natural ‘survival of the fittest’. Himmler understood this very well. It was essential that he disguise his master plan for the SS so that he retained his claim to be ‘loyal Heinrich’, not a rival. Hitler deftly exploited Himmler’s anxieties concerning the intentions of his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. But Himmler rarely rose to the bait and took full advantage of the arcane mechanisms of the ‘Chaos State’ to pursue his own ends. His first big opportunity came in the summer of 1934.

In the period immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Hitler was preoccupied with the thorny matter of the storm troopers (SA) and their ambitious leader Captain Ernst Röhm. A thuggish homosexual, Röhm insisted that his brown-shirted hordes deserved the lion’s share of victory spoils now that Hitler had
become Chancellor thanks to their hard work and fearless struggle. Now, the SA leaders insisted, a ‘Second Revolution’ was needed to finish the job and properly ‘brown’ Hitler’s ‘New Order’. Röhm’s petulant ambition directly threatened the German army, the Reichswehr. He insisted that the SA should be acknowledged as Germany’s principal armed force. By mid-1934, an indecisive Hitler, possibly unwilling to betray old comrades, had been persuaded to turn against Röhm – and to liquidate the anachronous SA leadership. Himmler had once been Röhm’s deputy – but now he took a leading part in the assault on the SA leadership, the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.
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This notorious purge of troublesome former comrades marked a step change in the political fortunes of Himmler, the SS and Heydrich’s SD. Himmler had both proven himself loyal and demonstrated that the new state depended on his growing security apparatus. The purge liberated the SS and SD from SA control – and simultaneously raised the public standing of the SS. It was after the violent summer of 1934 that the German middle and upper classes began to perceive the SS as a way of reinforcing their status in the New Order. Bright young men flocked to join, bringing with them the aggressive racial ideologies of the German universities. The SS now became an academy of the most reactionary kind as well as a security state within a state.