Heinrich Himmler : A Life (72 page)

A month later, on 5 March, she reflected on her husband’s permanent overwork and his position in the Third Reich: ‘We spent almost 8 days in Gmund and two in Munich. Here on Tuesday we got back to lots of excitement. I lie in bed till midnight waiting for Heini. H is so tired and exhausted from all the annoyance and I always think he gets so little credit. I sometimes rack my brains thinking why things are as they are. Are his enemies really so powerful? But H is cheerful and brave and I try to be cheerful too.’

‘Austria is now part of the German Reich. H was the first to arrive in Vienna.’ Margarete Himmler noted this with satisfaction in her diary on 13 March 1938. For her this marked the end of a period in which the political tension had had a direct impact on the atmosphere in Himmler’s family. ‘We could never escape the tension. Every day brought something new. H, who naturally knew what was going on, was in a good mood, indeed really cheerful. But for me, who could only watch the comings and goings and had to pack his military uniform, it was all too stressful.’
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In January 1938 the German police had begun extensive preparations for the mobilization of around 20,000 policemen, allegedly for a big parade. In fact the police were preparing for the invasion of Austria, in which eventually, on 12 March, motorized police units from all over the Reich participated side by side with Wehrmacht units.
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The excuse for Hitler to undertake the so-called Anschluss, which had been planned for months and was carried out by force, was provided by the sudden announcement by the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, on 9 March, of his intention to carry out a plebiscite only a few days later on the maintenance of Austrian independence. His aim was thereby to demonstrate Austria’s determination to retain its independence in the face of increasing German pressure. Hitler was not prepared to wait for this plebiscite, and indeed insisted that it should not take place. He succeeded in forcing Schuschnigg’s resignation and his replacement as Chancellor by the leader of the Austrian Nazis, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Seyss-Inquart then requested German troops to be sent in, as he had been instructed to do by the German government.
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In fact Himmler had flown to Vienna in the early morning of 12 March, before German units at the head of an armed commando occupied the city. The journal
Die Deutsche Polizei
(
The German Police
) informed its readers that the Reichsführer-SS ‘landed unexpectedly this morning around 5 o’clock at Aspern airport near Vienna before any German units had crossed the border. Accompanied by, amongst others, SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich, he took the initial measures necessary to maintain law and order and thus was the first representative of the National Socialist Reich to step onto Austrian soil.’
⁹³
The paper spoke of a ‘bold coup by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’, by which ‘this revolution, one of the most epoch-making in the history of the world [. . .] was carried out without a single shot being fired and without any blood being spilt’. However, the article did not have the resonance it sought. Goebbels had the paper confiscated, since in the article concerned ‘virtually all the secrets of 10–13 March were betrayed’.
⁹⁴
This was something of a disgrace for the Chief of Police and Secret Police.

But to return to Himmler’s appearance in Vienna on 12 March: here he hoped that, by issuing tough-sounding orders, he would be able to wipe out the memory of the defeat that his SS had suffered in 1934 after the attack on the Viennese Federal Chancellery. One of his announcements, for example,
read: ‘in Vienna 800 Austrian SS men are protecting the Seyss-Inquart government in the Federal Chancellery from armed Reds.’
⁹⁵

Himmler, accompanied by Seyss-Inquart, then moved on from Vienna to Linz, where he arrived around midday in order to greet Hitler, who had arrived in his homeland.
⁹⁶
On 14 March Himmler had not been able to resist marching into Vienna with Sepp Dietrich, ‘at the head of the Leibstandarte’, as
Die Deutsche Polizei
reported. The next day he travelled west to meet Hitler, who was on his way from Linz to Vienna. He met him halfway there, at St Pölten; from there he accompanied him to Vienna, where, on the same day, the big demonstration took place in the Heldenplatz at which Hitler announced the ‘entry of my homeland into the German Reich’, to the applause of a huge crowd.

On 18 March Himmler ordered the establishment of a Gestapo headquarters in Vienna modelled on the organization he had created in the ‘Reich’, as well as the establishment of Gestapo district headquarters in the provincial capitals of the Austrian provinces.
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On 14 March he had already appointed the Gestapo chief Hermann Müller to be Inspector of the Security Police in Austria. He remained in this post until the summer of 1938. His successor was Walter Stahlecker.
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On 21 March Himmler appointed two new special staffs who had responsibility for supervising the establishment of the order and security police and liaising with the central agencies in Berlin.
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At the beginning of April 1938 he toured the Austrian provincial capitals in order to inspect their police departments,
¹⁰⁰
and between 23 and 25 May he once again visited Vienna. In general Himmler succeeded in integrating the police of the Austrian ‘corporate state’ into the German system without generating too much friction. One of their most pressing tasks was to organize a wave of arrests of political opponents, in particular communists and socialists.
¹⁰¹

As in the two previous years, and in the midst of this reorganization of the Austrian police, between 2 and 10 May the Reichsführer undertook an official visit to Italy.
¹⁰²
As before, he was accompanied by his wife Margarete, and again the visit was not without its hiccups. Margarete’s refusal to follow court protocol and curtsey when being received by the Queen of Italy—we should not have to do that!—caused offence. The ‘whole court’, she wrote in her diary, was ‘peeved’. And, all in all: ‘there was a lack of order and there were some funny situations. What a way to be treated. Such courts have funny customs. They don’t regard anyone who isn’t a courtier as a human being.’
¹⁰³

Ill. 17.
Himmler and his SS were to play a central role in the annexation of foreign territories by the German Reich. The picture shows Himmler and the chief of the order police, Kurt Daluege, at the ceremony where the Austrian police swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler on 15 March 1938.

A substantial number of motorized police units participated in the occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938, as well as two Einsatzgruppen of the security police. The latter had originally been established with the aim of operating throughout the country in the event of a German attack on Czechoslovakia.
¹⁰⁴
However, when this had to be postponed as a result of the Munich Agreement of 30 September, which granted the Sudeten German territory to Germany, the two Einsatzgruppen entered the Sudetenland. They confiscated Czech police documents and, by the end of the year, had carried out a large number of arrests, possibly affecting as many as 10,000 Czechs and Germans.
¹⁰⁵
Armed SS units—the whole of the SS Verfügungstruppe as well as four Death’s Head battalions—also marched into the Sudetenland, representing the SS’s first military action.
¹⁰⁶
By the end of September other Death’s Head units had arrived to reinforce the
Sudeten German Free Corps formed from refugees entering Czech territory and occupying a small amount of border territory.
¹⁰⁷

On 1 October this Free Corps, which had been trained by the SA and supplied with arms by the Wehrmacht, was subordinated to the SS. However, the SS proved incapable of taking on the provisioning of food and other necessities, which had hitherto been supplied by the SA and paid for by the Wehrmacht. According to the Wehrmacht High Command’s liaison officer with the Free Corps, this provoked ‘discontent among the leaders of the Free Corps, threatening to jeopardize the internal structure of the corps which it had taken considerable effort to establish. The fear, which was justified, was that the SA leaders who had proved themselves in action and in establishing [the corps] would be replaced by ones from the SS.’ There were signs that the force was liable to disintegrate. Moreover, the SS began to try to recruit members of the Free Corps, which created ‘bitterness’ among SA leaders. ‘In order to win over the leadership of the Free Corps the deputy leader of the Sudeten Germans and his chief of staff were offered high-ranking positions in the SS. However, they rejected them.’
¹⁰⁸
‘It was shocking to experience how two components of the state (leaders of the SA and SS) were involved in a more or less latent opposition to one another, whose effects were having a negative impact on the leadership and the unity of the force’, concluded the lieutenant-colonel concerned.
¹⁰⁹
Clearly, five years after the Röhm affair relations between the SS and the SA were anything but harmonious.

The SS’s engagement in the Sudetenland had, however, increased Himmler’s military ambitions. On 8 November, after the conclusion of the occupation, Himmler reported to his Gruppenführer in Munich that during the Sudeten crisis he had mobilized 5,000 SS men between the ages of 45 and 50, of whom the SS had kept on 3,500 in the force. As a result of this mobilization it had been possible to remove active Death’s Head units from the concentration camps and establish six new battalions. In addition, he had mobilized 11,000 men to act as police reinforcements.
¹¹⁰

The Nazi regime’s move to an overt policy of expansion went hand in hand with increased persecution of the Jews. This became particularly apparent after the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, when Nazi activists satisfied
their pent-up desire to indulge in anti-Jewish acts, particularly in Vienna, where there was a large number of attacks on Jews as well as arbitrary and illegal expropriation of property.
¹¹¹

The fact that, after the annexation of Austria, the SD, which was really a party organization, succeeded in acquiring executive powers in the sphere of Jewish policy proved decisive for the development of SS Jewish policy. Adolf Eichmann, who had been sent to Vienna as the SD’s Jewish expert, managed to persuade the Reich Commissar in Austria, Josef Bürckel, to establish a ‘Central Agency for Jewish Emigration’ on 20 August 1938, and to assign to the SD responsibility for running this organization. With the aid of this agency Eichmann introduced a system by which Jews who were compelled to emigrate were rapidly processed through all the various bureaucratic procedures. The whole process was financed by the property which the Viennese Jews were forced to hand over as they passed through it.
¹¹²

After the Anschluss the Nazis increased the persecution of the Jews. A new wave of anti-Jewish laws was issued, which among other things prepared for the ‘aryanization’ of what property the Jews still possessed. In the course of the ‘asocial’ action of June 1938, as has already been indicated, the Kripo also arrested a large number of Jews and placed them in preventive detention.
¹¹³

What then, at this stage, did Himmler intend to do with the Jews who were resident in Germany?

As has already been pointed out, prior to 1938 Himmler made relatively few comments, either public or private, on the ‘Jewish question’. The reason for this was not because he was not anti-Semitic, but presumably simply because, unlike in the case of other issues such as the fight against ‘asocials’ and homosexuals or the church question, in Himmler’s view Jewish persecution required little engagement on his part. There was a consensus among the most important actors in Jewish policy—Hitler, the Four Year Plan organization under Göring, as well as the Reich Interior Ministry under Frick—to radicalize the persecution in stages, in order thereby to exclude German Jews completely from the economy and society and try to persuade them to emigrate. Within the context of this policy Heydrich’s security police and the SD performed their role so effectively that Himmler was rarely obliged to intervene himself.

In the spring of 1938 Himmler took a decision in an individual case concerning the request of a female German Jew living abroad to enter
Germany, the justification for which helps to reveal his long-term objective for dealing with the Jews. The Reichsführer responded to the request by saying that the person concerned could enter the country, so long as she ‘commits herself to staying in Germany because Germany [is not prepared] to give up its most valuable pawn, the Jews’. This decision was in complete contradiction to the forced-emigration policy which the SD in particular was pursuing after the Anschluss, and thus caused considerable consternation in its Jewish department. In response, the department asked Himmler whether his decision meant that ‘all rich Jews’, as well as ‘all well-known Jews or those suitable to act as pawns’, should be excluded from the emigration programme. Himmler initialled the document without commenting further, and in July announced that the matter was closed.
¹¹⁴
The idea of keeping wealthy Jews as hostages reflected Himmler’s extreme utilitarian mentality, and was to preoccupy him again and again in the coming years.