Army of Evil: A History of the SS (60 page)

Nevertheless, on 28 April, international press agencies carried the story that Himmler had offered to surrender Germany to the Western Allies. Obviously, this was picked up in Berlin, where Hitler and his inner circle were sheltering in their bunker, now completely surrounded by the Red Army.
²⁰
Hitler was incensed by what he regarded as treason from a man whose loyalty he had never questioned. Of course, Himmler
had
remained loyal—at least until Hitler’s position had become literally hopeless—but that was not enough for the dictator.

Hitler’s first act of vengeance for this supposed treachery fell not on Himmler, but on SS-General Hermann Fegelein. The dashing cavalry commander had succeeded Wolff as liaison officer between Himmler and Hitler in October 1943, and had cemented his place in Hitler’s inner circle by marrying Eva Braun’s sister the following year. He had been living in and around the bunker as the Soviets had tightened their noose around Berlin, but had suddenly disappeared on 27 April.
Members of Hitler’s close protection detail, led by SS-Lieutenant Colonel Peter Högl,
²¹
were sent to find him, and Fegelein was discovered with his Hungarian mistress at his flat off the Kurfürstendamm,
*
drunk, dressed in civilian clothes, with a stash of cash and jewellery.
²²
A court-martial was immediately convened under the presidency of SS-Brigadier Wilhelm Möhnke, the commander of Hitler’s SS military escort. However, Fegelein was too drunk to face this, so he was put in the custody of Heinrich Müller to sober up. News of Himmler’s peace moves arrived while he was being interrogated the next day. A search of Fegelein’s office revealed that he knew of Himmler’s contacts with Bernadotte, and the enraged Hitler ordered him to be shot without further ado.
²³
He was taken into the garden of the Reich Chancellery and executed by a firing squad from Hitler’s close protection team.
²⁴

Himmler himself was stripped of all of his state and party roles on 29 April. Karl Hanke, the Regional Leader of Breslau, was appointed National Leader of the SS in his place.
²⁵
However, this appointment was as meaningless as Himmler’s peace offer: Hanke was still in Breslau, which was besieged by the Soviets.

The next day, Soviet soldiers advanced to within a few hundred metres of Hitler’s bunker. A surprisingly large proportion of the defenders were of foreign origin, drawn from the Norwegian and Danish Panzer-Grenadier regiments of the
Nordland
Division, a few hundred French volunteers, and a company of Spanish Fascists who had joined the Waffen-SS when the Blue Division was withdrawn from German service in 1943. As these soldiers were forced back by the Red Army, Hitler appointed Admiral Karl Dönitz, the chief of the German Navy, based in the north German town of Plön, his successor as head of state. Then the man who had ruled Germany for over twelve years committed suicide. To all intents and purposes, the National Socialist era was over.

By this stage, Himmler had established his headquarters at Lübeck, and he immediately offered his services to the new administration when word arrived from Bormann that Hitler was dead and Dönitz was now in control of Germany and its armed forces. Dönitz later claimed that he turned Himmler down flat, but this seems unlikely, given the number of conversations the two men had around this time.
²⁶
In fact, it seems that Himmler advised on the best way to conduct surrender negotiations until 5 May, when a provisional ceasefire came into effect on Dönitz’s orders. At this point, Himmler gave a short speech to his remaining entourage—a disparate group of senior SS bureaucrats, Waffen-SS personnel, members of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, and his personal staff, including SS-Colonel Rudi Brandt, his long-serving personal assistant—in which he effectively told them to make a run for it.

Himmler himself remained in and around Flensburg for a few days after the German surrender on 7 May, probably with his mistress.
*
Then he tried to escape, heading south towards Bavaria disguised as a Field Security Police NCO and wearing an eye-patch. He was accompanied by Werner Grothmann, one of his adjutants, and Heinz Macher, a young but highly decorated Waffen-SS captain, who were both dressed as army privates. They set out first by car and then, after reaching the River Elbe, on foot, posing as military refugees who were heading home. On 21 May, they were stopped at a British checkpoint between Hamburg and Bremen. Unfortunately for Himmler, he now discovered that Field Security Police NCOs were subject to automatic arrest, so all three men were detained and then moved to a holding camp at Westertimke. Nobody recognised Himmler, but he was sent on to an interrogation centre at Barfeld, near Lüneberg, where he arrived on 23 May.
²⁷
At that point, he decided to identify himself. In a
meeting with the camp commandant, Captain Selvester, he removed his eye-patch, put on his distinctive spectacles and quietly said, “Heinrich Himmler.” Selvester later recalled: “His identity was at once obvious.”
²⁸

Military intelligence was immediately alerted, and Himmler was given a thorough body search. This revealed two brass tubes, similar to cartridge cases: one was empty, while the other contained a glass phial of a substance Selvester took to be poison. The commandant assumed that Himmler had concealed the other phial, possibly in his mouth. Selvester ordered food and tea for the prisoner and watched closely as he ate, but he noticed nothing unusual. A few hours later, Himmler was collected by Colonel Michael Murphy, from Montgomery’s intelligence staff, and driven to a villa in Lüneburg.
²⁹
The British were still convinced that he was concealing poison in his mouth; and they were right. As a military doctor prepared to give him an oral examination, he turned his head to one side, flicked the phial from a gap in his teeth with his tongue, and bit down on it.

Despite prolonged resuscitation attempts by the doctor, Heinrich Himmler was dead within a few minutes.
³⁰

*
He lost his left eye, his right hand and two fingers from his left hand when his car was strafed by British aircraft in Tunisia in 1943.

*
The conspirators had originally intended to kill both Himmler and Hitler in a single explosion, in the hope of paralysing the SS as well as the government, but this plan was abandoned because Himmler rarely attended the situation conferences.

*
One of Berlin’s most fashionable shopping streets, equivalent to Knightsbridge in London or Park Avenue in New York.

*
Himmler is reputed to have had affairs with several women during his years as National Leader of the SS. The longest lasting of these was Hedwig Potthast, the daughter of a Cologne businessman, who had worked as Himmler’s secretary and with whom he had two children (a son born in 1942 and a daughter born in 1944).

I
t proved relatively easy to bury the SS in the aftermath of the war. Waffen-SS personnel were obliged to conform with the terms of the German surrender and turn themselves in to the Allied occupation forces as prisoners of war, and the great majority of them did so.
¹
By 1945, the General-SS consisted of little more than a few offices manned by men too old or unfit to have been conscripted into the armed forces or Waffen-SS. For the most part, these remnants of a bygone age hung up their uniforms, went home and hoped that their connection to the organisation would not be noticed by the occupiers.

A few senior SS officers tried to go on the run, but none got very far. Globocnik hid in the Austrian Alps but was found by a British patrol after being denounced by an informer. He killed himself by taking poison on 31 May 1945.
²
Kaltenbrunner was arrested in the Bavarian Alps
³
and faced trial at Nuremberg, which made him the most senior member of the SS to face the International Military Tribunal. He was hanged after being found guilty of war crimes, as were
Oswald Pohl and Kurt Daluege.
*
Heinrich Müller was probably killed—or committed suicide—in Berlin shortly after Hitler’s death, although his body was never found.
⁴
Likewise, Richard Glücks, the last Inspector of Concentration Camps, seems to have killed himself at Murwik Naval Base, Flensburg, on 10 May 1945,
⁵
but his death went unrecorded.

A few SS men who had committed war crimes and/or crimes against humanity managed to evade justice, for a time at least. The best known of these was Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the US Army under the name “Otto Eckmann” but managed to escape, via Italy, to Argentina. He lived and worked there—as “Ricardo Klement”—for ten years before being captured by Israeli agents in 1960. Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, also escaped via Italy. He ended up in Brazil, where he lived under his own name for sixteen years before being extradited to West Germany. Aside from two months as a prisoner of war in 1945, Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz medical officer, was never captured. He died in Brazil in 1979. None of these men benefited from any sort of conspiratorial SS underground network. Instead, they were assisted by a few naïve or sympathetic individuals who were prepared to help them evade justice.
⁶

Most former SS personnel faced nothing more than a spell in a prisoner of war camp, followed by a “de-Nazification” hearing at the time of their release. This included the higher echelons of the organisation. In the view of Heinz Höhne, “The majority of the SS leaders were treated with remarkable leniency.”
⁷

Of course, history has not been so forgiving. When Himmler assumed control of the SS in 1929, he envisioned it becoming the
Staatschutzkorps
(state protection corps), an all-pervasive police and security body that would replace the existing police system. However, he saw its role as much more than simply engaging and defeating enemies of
the state. As a wholehearted adherent to the racist doctrine of National Socialism, as well as a fiercely ambitious man, he wanted to place his organisation in the vanguard of the Third Reich as the principal protector of the German racial community. That necessitated total acceptance of Hitler’s racist philosophy and determination to put it into practice by recruiting men with the ideological conviction to carry out whatever measures were deemed necessary. He achieved this by making the SS an “elite order,” vaguely modelled on medieval chivalric orders but imbued with National Socialist ideology. Talented and ambitious young men flocked to join, providing Himmler with the manpower to enforce Hitler’s will. The central idea of National Socialism—that the German people were involved in a Darwinian struggle with the Jews for world supremacy—gave the SS its mission and transformed it from a repressive police force into an instrument of genocide.

*
Daluege had suffered a massive heart attack in 1943 and had effectively retired. He had been replaced as head of the Order Police Main Office by General Alfred Wünnenberg.

APPENDIX: TABLE OF COMPARATIVE MILITARY RANKS