Masters of Death (50 page)
The riches they had we have taken from them. I have given a strict order, which SS-Obergruppenführer Pohl has carried out, that all these riches shall of course be turned over to the Reich. We have taken none of them for ourselves. Individuals who disobeyed will be punished according to the order I issued at the beginning: whoever takes even one mark is a dead man. A number of SS men—not very many—have violated that order, and that will be their death, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill these people who wanted to kill us. But we don’t have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, one watch, one mark, one cigarette or anything else. Just because we exterminated a bacillus, after all, we don’t want to be infected by it and die. I will not allow even the smallest rotten spot to appear or to take hold. Wherever it may open, together we will cauterize it. In general, though, we can say that we have accomplished this most burdensome task out of love for our people. And we have not damaged our inner being, our soul, our character thereby.
Of course Himmler was posturing before his generals. The historical record is thick with testimony to theft and corruption at every level, to breakdown and maleficence; many of the Gruppenführers, those with any brains, must have been laughing behind their hands. Jeckeln maintained a warehouse of stolen goods in Riga; he used to sit at his desk in the Ritterhaus sorting jewelry.
The historian Peter Haidu, exploring the rhetoric of Himmler’s Posen speech, observes that in speaking of seeing corpses lying side by side he makes “no mention . . . of the possible narrative role the individual subject might have played as an agent in producing the scene before his eyes. He is represented only in a passive and cognitive role: any potential narrative is elided.” That is not only a rhetorical strategy, however: it’s Himmler’s own narcissistic perspective on the Holocaust: looking down from above, a coward ordering others to kill, almost too squeamish even to watch. He never stole a wedding ring or a cigarette, but he hardly needed to. He took from the victims on the grand scale, stealing their lives, the lives of their families, the life of their communities, their peace and their future, enlarging his power through their suffering. Signaling that tumescence, he reverted at the end of the speech to his
Wehrbauern
plans and droned on about colonizing the East “in bold strokes, without inhibition.”
He managed to be marginally less dishonest two days later when he spoke in similar vein, perhaps from the same notes, to the Reichleiters and Gauleiters, burning their bridges by making sure they could not deny knowledge of the loathsome conspiracy. Speer was there, party secretary and Führer shadow Martin Bormann, new commander in chief of the navy Admiral Karl Dönitz, the leaders of the party and the Reich. Himmler repeated, a little more politely, his contemptuous remarks about good Jews and good Germans. Then, to spice his lament on the burden of duty, he bragged about killing women and children:
I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of. We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men—so to speak killing or ordering them killed—and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this Volk to disappear from the earth. To organize the execution of this mission was the most difficult task we had hitherto. It was accomplished without—as I believe I am able to say—our men or our officers suffering injury to spirit or soul. This danger was very close. The way between the two possibilities, either to become too crude, to become heartless and no longer to respect human life, or to become weak and crack up in a nervous breakdown—the path between this Scylla and Charybdis is horribly narrow. . . .
The Jewish question in those countries occupied by us will be settled by the end of this year. Only a residue of individual Jews will remain in hiding.
This cruel, rigid, fussy pervert, bragging about mass murder and claiming he came off clean, had long since ceased to respect human life if he had ever done so. Gitta Sereny tells a story emblematic of what Himmler had become. He kept a mistress, Hedwig Potthast; with money borrowed from the party through Bormann he had built her a new house on the Berghof near Hitler and Bormann himself. One afternoon in 1944, Himmler’s mistress invited Bormann’s wife and Bormann’s fourteen-year-old son Martin Jr. and younger daughter Eike for tea. “She gave us chocolate and cake,” Martin Jr. told Sereny in 1990 at a therapy group for the children of high-ranking Nazis. After tea, Sereny writes, “Frau Potthast said she would show them something interesting, a special collection Himmler kept in what had become his special lair. She led the way up to the attic.” Martin Jr. continues the story:
When she opened the door and we flocked in, we didn’t understand what the objects in that room were—until she explained, quite scientifically, you know. . . . It was tables and chairs made of parts of human bodies. There was a chair . . . the seat was a human pelvis, the legs human legs—on human feet. And then she picked up a copy of Mein Kampf from a pile of them—all I could think of was that my father had told me not to bother to read it as it had been outdated by events. . . . She showed us the cover—made of human skin, she said— and explained that the Dachau prisoners who produced it used the Rückenhaut, the skin of the back, to make it.
“He said they fled,” Sereny continues, “his mother pushing them ahead of her down the stairs. ‘Eike was terribly upset,’ he said, ‘and I was too.’ It hadn’t helped them much, he said, when his mother, trying to calm them, told them that their father had refused to have the book in the house when Himmler had sent him a similar copy.” Someone who listened to the story at the therapy group commented, “The swine.” Martin Bormann’s sixty-year-old son responded, “To call those people swine is an insult to swine.”
In Himmler’s last days, after the Normandy invasion, after the bomb exploded in the Führer bunker in Berlin on the same day Hedwig Potthast bore him a second child, after the Red Army had overrun Majdanek and he had unloosed Sonderkommando Dirlewanger on Warsaw when that beleaguered city had risen in revolt, the Reichsführer-SS took to his bed with stomach cramps like a Victorian neurasthenic and began negotiating an imagined new role for himself in postwar Europe. Kersten was amazed, in December 1944, to find Himmler dreaming up an agreement between England and Germany:
Himmler said that all propaganda, particularly by way of neutral channels, would concentrate on bringing home to the English how much they had to gain from an agreement of this kind. He would talk to Goebbels and Ribbentrop about this very important matter of policy. It would not fail to make an impression in England that such a suggestion should emanate from him, who represented with his SS the factor which contributed most to order in Europe. . . .
Himmler looked at me, expecting an answer. It was obvious to me that he was still swayed by ideology and was quite unaware that his reputation abroad was not that of a factor making for order, but rather that of a hangman, a murderer on a vast scale and above all else the man responsible for the abominable campaign against the Jews. No government would dare to treat with him, even if it wanted to. I hesitated a moment before telling him the brutal truth, then I let him have it, holding nothing back.
It was with something more than astonishment that I heard Himmler assert that these “calumnies” spread about by enemy propaganda would have to be rectified. “The West has accepted a man like Stalin as an ally, and worse things could be said against him.” Himmler put an end to the conversation, because he did not like to hear things which would not fit in with his theory.
By April 1945 Himmler was negotiating with the director of the Swedish section of the Jewish World Congress, telling Kersten, “I want to bury the hatchet between us and the Jews. If I had had my own way, many things would have been done differently.” Nothing was done differently; the previous November 1944 he had ordered an end to the murders in the death camps and then reversed the order when Hitler had found out, with the brutal results—murder by forced marches to nowhere—that Daniel Goldhagen first extensively chronicled.
Later in April 1945 Speer found Himmler at Hohenlychen, the hospital north of Berlin:
The world in which Himmler was still moving was fantastic. “Europe cannot manage without me in the future either,” he commented. “It will go on needing me as Minister of Police. After I’ve spent an hour with Eisenhower he’ll appreciate the fact. They’ll soon realize that they’re dependent on me—or they’ll have a hopeless chaos on their hands.” He spoke of his contacts with Count Bernadotte, which involved transfer of the concentration camps to the International Red Cross. . . .Earlier, they had always talked about liquidating all political prisoners before the end. Now Himmler was trying to strike some private bargains with the victors. . . .
Finally, Himmler after all held out a faint prospect of my becoming a minister in his government. For my part, with some sarcasm I offered him my plane so he could pay a farewell visit to Hitler. But Himmler waved that aside. He had no time for that now, he said. Unemotionally, he explained: “Now I must prepare my new government. And besides, my person is too important for the future of Germany for me to risk the flight.”
When Hitler heard that Himmler had been negotiating with the Allies, he ordered truehearted Heinrich’s arrest as a traitor and expelled him from the Nazi Party and all his offices.
American and Soviet troops linked up at Torgau on the Elbe on 25 April 1945. Five days later, having married Eva Braun and dictated his final testament, Hitler committed suicide by shooting himself with a Walther pistol in the right temple while biting into a cyanide capsule. An orderly, Hermann Karnau, recalled the aftermath:
I was commanded by an SS officer to leave my station. . . . I did so and went into the officers’ club. After half an hour I returned. The entrance to the Führer bunker was locked. I went back and tried to get in through the emergency exit, the one which led to the garden of the Reich Chancellery. As I reached the corner between the tall sentry-post bunker and the Führer bunker proper, when I was up there, I suddenly saw what looked like a petrol rag being thrown. In front of me lay Adolf Hitler on his back and Eva Braun on her belly. I definitely established that it was he. I went back and informed my comrade Hilger Poppen, who however didn’t believe me. Half an hour later I returned to the spot. I could no longer recognize him because he was pretty charred. I spoke to Erich Mansfeld, who was at this time on sentry duty in the tower, who also confirmed: There lies Adolf Hitler. He is burning. I left this place . . . and by the staircase met Sturmbannführer Schedle, who confirmed that the Chief was burning behind the house in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. At about 1300 [one p.m.] I was at this spot again. . . . I saw that Hitler and Eva Braun by now had burnt to the point that the skeletal structure could clearly be seen. Whether during the period from 1800 to 2000 [six to eight p.m.] gasoline was poured over the remains once more, I don’t know, but when I was there again at 2000, cinders were already flying in the wind.
Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945. Himmler lay low in Flensburg, on the Danish border, with Potthast, their two children, Ohlendorf and several former subordinates. He tried to move by car to Bavaria on 10 May 1945, disguised as Sturmscharführer Heinrich Hitzinger of the Geheime Feldpolizei—the Secret Military Police, a branch of the Gestapo—with his mustache shaved off and a black patch over his left eye. The group made little progress in the confusion of Russian and British troop movements, refugees and damaged roads and bridges, and on 20 May 1945 Himmler and two adjutants, all three now in civilian clothing, were arrested at a British checkpoint between Hamburg and Bremen. They were driven to a British POW camp, ending up three days later at an interrogation center near Lüneburg, where Himmler identified himself and was recognized and searched. Two small brass cases turned up in his clothes, one holding a glass capsule, the other empty. His guard assumed the capsules contained cyanide and that one must be in his mouth and began watching him closely.
The officer in charge, Captain Tom Selvester, remembered that strange day with Himmler waiting for an interrogation officer to arrive:
He behaved perfectly correctly, and gave me the impression that he realized things had caught up with him. He was quite prepared to talk, and indeed at times appeared almost jovial. He looked ill when I first saw him, but improved tremendously after a meal and a wash. . . . He was in my custody for approximately eight hours, and during that time, whilst not being interrogated, asked repeatedly about the whereabouts of his “Adjutants,” appearing genuinely worried over their welfare.
Colonel Michael Murphy, the interrogation officer, arrived at eight in the evening and moved Himmler roughly by car to an interrogation center at British Second Army headquarters outside Lüneburg. There a doctor, C. J. L. Wells, saw him stripped, gave him a thorough body search and finally tried to examine his mouth. “Wells saw a small black knob protruding between a gap in [Himmler’s] teeth on the lower righthand side,” Padfield says—the cyanide capsule’s rubber stopper. He asked Himmler to move to a light. Himmler did, made to open his mouth, but as Wells reached in to remove the capsule Himmler jerked away and crushed it, releasing a lethal dose of cyanide.
Himmler died at 11:04 p.m., 23 May 1945. In the next days British Army pathologists took a death mask and performed an autopsy, reserving a slice or two of brain. On 26 May 1945 a four-man British guard unit trucked Himmler’s corpse to Lüneburg Heath and buried it in an unmarked grave. It was no killing pit, but it would do.
