Heinrich Himmler : A Life (45 page)

As confirmed by other prisoners, during such visits Himmler appears to have liked to present himself in the pose of the victor. On 30 September 1942, during a visit to Sachsenhausen KZ, for example, he encountered Herbert Blank, a ‘special prisoner of the Reichsführer-SS’. Blank had been a leading member of the Combat Group of Revolutionary National Socialists, in other words, the group which, under the leadership of Otto Strasser, had split off from the Nazis in 1930. Blank recorded in an article published in 1948 that Himmler had advised him to ‘get used to the idea’ ‘that I can never release you as long as you live’.
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On a visit to Dachau in June 1938 Himmler insisted on being introduced to the ‘prominent’ Austrian prisoners individually.
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Himmler also liked giving guided tours of the camps. For example, in 1936 he took the members of the Friends of the Reichsführer-SS (a sponsors’ organization) as well as the Reich leadership of the NSDAP and its Gauleiters round Dachau; in spring 1938 he took a large group of journalists round Sachsenhausen, and in the summer of 1938 Reich Interior Minister
Frick and high-ranking civil servants. In the following January he was present when Eicke and Pohl showed police chiefs round Sachsenhausen, and in the summer he arranged a further visit of the same camp for his circle of Friends; at the end of 1940 he was there to greet a delegation of ethnic German politicians from Alsace.
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With his appointment as Chief of the German Police Himmler’s ambitions appeared to be entirely concentrated on internal security. This is the impression he tried to create with the Wehrmacht, in order not to arouse any suspicions in their minds concerning the further development of the SS’s armed units.
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On 1 October 1936 Himmler had established the Inspectorate of the Verfügungstruppe, which was subordinated to the SS Main Office, and appointed the commander of the leadership school in Brunswick, Paul Hausser, to head it.
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Moreover, in the same year he combined existing units to create two new regiments in addition to the Leibstandarte, the SS-Standarten ‘Deutschland’ and ‘Germania’. And then, following the so-called Anschluss with Austria, he established the Vienna Standarte, ‘Der Führer’.
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Furthermore, the expansion of the concentration camps led to the guard units of the KZs, the Death’s Head units, being increasingly drawn into the militarization process. From 1937 onwards they were combined to form three Standarten and, after the Anschluss with Austria, were joined by an additional one.
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On 17 August 1938 Hitler issued an edict, which Himmler had seen and made alterations to in draft, regulating the basis on which the armed SS units were to operate and their relationship with the Wehrmacht.
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Hitler determined that the armed units and the Death’s Head units were neither part of the Wehrmacht nor of the police, but a ‘standing armed force’. The Death’s Head units were designed ‘to solve special tasks of a police nature’, while the armed units were to be at Hitler’s ‘exclusive disposal’. This description of the tasks of the armed units was much vaguer than the one given in 1934. At that time it had been established that the armed SS units were primarily to have domestic political functions, and that the Wehrmacht could call on them in time of war. As late as January 1937 Himmler had emphasized to Wehrmacht officers that he would assign elements of the police to the army in the event of a war, while the Death’s
Head units would form an ‘intervention force’ distributed throughout the Reich.
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However, in the same speech he had also stated that in a future war, in addition to the three fronts on land, sea, and in the air, there would be a fourth ‘battlefield’: ‘the German homeland.’
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Thus, in his view, in a future war it would be completely impossible to draw a sharp line separating domestic political security functions from military activity, and it was this view of the comprehensive nature of a future war that formed the basis for his vision of the special position of a state protection corps in the Third Reich.

Himmler used another occasion, an address to SS-Gruppenführer on 8 November 1938, to explain that, in his view, there was absolutely no contradiction between the internal security tasks of the SS and their engagement on the front line:

If I describe the overall task of the SS as being, together with the police [ . . . ] to guarantee Germany’s internal security then this task can be carried out only if a section of the SS, this leadership corps, is prepared to stand and die at the front. If we didn’t make any sacrifices and didn’t fight at the front then we should have lost the moral authority to shoot down people at home who are trying to avoid their commitments and behaving as cowards. That is the function of the armed units, that is their glorious task—to be permitted to go the front.

Furthermore, Himmler announced his intention to have a whole army corps instead of the single division which he had been allocated. Evidently he was aiming to thwart the Wehrmacht’s intention of using the armed SS as auxiliaries in a future war, distributed among the various fronts, and instead to lead his men into battle as a closed formation.
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Between January 1935 and December 1938 Himmler built up the armed units from a figure of barely 5,000 to over 14,000 men, and the Death’s Head units from barely 2,000 to over 9,000.
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He did this with some degree of finesse. When, during the mobilization for the occupation of the Sudetenland in autumn 1938, the SS armed units as well as some Death’s Head formations were integrated into the army, Himmler recruited up to around 5,000 men into the SS as ‘police reinforcements’. He retained 2,000 of these reservists in the Death’s Head units and in 1939 recruited further reservists.
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The military character of the armed SS units was made very clear in a Führer edict of 18 May 1939. In it Hitler ordered that the existing units should be formed into a division, but also made it clear that this marked ‘the
end of the expansion of the Verfügungstruppe’. The edict also established a limit to the size of armed SS formations of 20,000 for the Verfügungstruppe, 14,000 for the Death’s Head units, and 25,000 for the police reinforcements.
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By the outbreak of war Himmler had brought the actual strength of the Verfügungstruppe up to around 18,000 men and that of the Death’s Head units, including the police reinforcements, to over 22,000, which therefore remained slightly below the limit.
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Himmler clarified how he envisaged the deployment of the armed SS formations in the event of a war or civil war at a Gruppenführer meeting in Munich on 8 November 1938:

I have told the commander of the Standarte ‘Deutschland’ that I consider it right, and this also applies to the coming war, that SS men should never be taken prisoner. Before that can happen they should take their own lives. We shall also not take any prisoners. Future wars won’t be skirmishes but rather life-and-death struggles between nations [ . . . ] However kind and decent we may want to be as individuals, we will be pitiless if it is a matter of preserving our nation from death. Then it doesn’t matter if 1,000 inhabitants of a town have to be finished off. I will do it and I would expect you to carry it out as well.
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Himmler pursued his goal of amalgamating the SS and police to form a ‘state protection corps’ with great determination. We have already dealt with his ideological premises and the role he envisaged for it. The Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police rapidly got to grips with the personnel and organizational issues involved. In 1937 Himmler created the post of Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF). The incumbents of the new post, which had been created specifically with reference to the mobilization for war, operated in future as his personal representatives in the regions, and were entitled to issue directives to the various branches of the SS and police within a military district in his name.
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According to Himmler, this represented an important step towards ‘uniting the SS and police to form a corps for the Führer’s protection’.
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On 12 March 1938 the Reichsführer-SS made the first appointment: Obergruppenführer Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein, the commander of Oberabschnitt South and head of the police department in the Bavarian Interior Ministry, was appointed HSSPF in the Military Districts VII and
XIII.
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Another wave of appointments followed in June 1938. However, the HSSPFs’ responsibilities for the individual military districts, while at the same time being assigned to the regional state administrations, produced confusing chains of command.

Himmler’s strategy of favouring SS leaders when filling posts in the police, and of admitting as many members of the police as possible to the SS, represented a further important element in his policy of trying to merge the two organizations. As part of this process the regulations for admission to the police were continually simplified.
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Above all, he wished to emphasize the harmony that existed between the SS and police. Thus, during the party rally of 1938 a delegation of order police paraded demonstratively within the SS column.
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Already in 1937 Himmler had granted the order police the right to wear the SS runes on their uniform.
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Members of the security police who were simultaneously members of the SS were permitted to wear SS uniform while performing their duties.
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During the war this privilege was extended to members of the security police who were not even members of the SS.
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Himmler also ensured that the procedure for the approval of SS marriages, on which there will be more below, also applied to members of the police.
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Moreover, from 1937 onwards the police were integrated into the system of SS indoctrination that had been created by then.
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Furthermore, the police were included in the ‘Teutonic’ rituals and celebrations typical of the SS. For example, on Himmler’s orders the order police and security police, like the SS, replaced the traditional Christmas celebrations with ‘Yule celebrations’ on the day of the winter solstice.
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Much more serious was the fact that, shortly after the start of the war, members of the SS and police were subjected to a special SS judicial system modelled on that of the Wehrmacht. In this way Himmler ensured that crimes or misdemeanours committed by police and SS men were dealt with within the SS and were not revealed to the outside world.
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Himmler regarded the fusion of SS and police as a moral imperative. In his radio broadcast on German Police Day in 1937 he expressed his conviction that the fact that ‘they are rooted in the order of the SS, are bound by the strict rules of the SS [will] give German police officers the strength, with integrity and decency, to treat every case fairly, to be tough and uncompromising where necessary, to show understanding and magnanimity where possible and, in the process, despite all the filth and mean-spiritedness the
police inevitably experience, to affirm the goodness and merits of the German people’.
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It is clear that Himmler’s attempt to turn the SS and police into a solidly structured, uniform ‘state protection corps’ that could never be split up again was a response to political imperatives. It is equally clear, however, that political calculation was not the only motive for his designing his organization in the way he did. The organization and aims of the state protection corps were influenced by his phobias and prejudices, his fads and fancies, and his passions to an almost astonishing extent. His homophobia, for example, culminated in his making the pursuit of homosexuals one of the main tasks of the security police. There was his deep hostility to Christianity, his idealization of everything military, his control-freakery which, among other things, led him to attempt to withdraw the SS and police from the state’s judicial system. What the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police defined as ‘protection of the state’ can just as easily be seen as Himmler protecting himself, and that in a dual sense: in terms of a defence against his personal fears, and as a protective shield behind which he could follow his own personal interests and aims. That applies particularly to the SS, which, unlike the police, was removed from the grasp and intervention of other state agencies. Here, as we shall now see, Himmler could implement his own peculiar ideas unimpeded.

Between 1935 and 1937 there were about 200,000 members of the SS, and by the end of 1938, after the annexation of Austria, exactly 238,159, 95 per cent of whom belonged to the General SS. They came from all parts of society.
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Compared with the population as a whole they were decidedly over-represented in commerce, in the field of health-care, in the public services, and among semi-skilled and unskilled workers; among skilled workers and members of the free professions they were slightly under-represented; in agriculture above all, however, they were distinctly under-represented. Only 10 per cent of SS members worked in agriculture; in the Reich in general the proportion was around 22 per cent. Thus the social profile of the SS tended towards that of a modern service industry, and it is difficult to reconcile that with the vision Himmler was continually conjuring up of an ‘order’ rooted in blood and soil.
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The Reichsführer-SS therefore regarded it as his main task to strengthen the unity of the SS, whose composition was in fact heterogeneous and which was expanding in several directions, in such a way as to secure the organization’s long-term viability. In 1936, on the occasion of the annual meeting of Gruppenführer held at the commemorations of 9 November 1923, he made the following pronouncement on this problem: