Heinrich Himmler

of the Army and the Reichsfuhrer S.S.’

The Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 resolved this particular deadlock. Hitler, as usual, was not greatly upset to find Himmler trying to spike the Army’s guns; it satisfied his intuitive sense of security. He had in fact as recently as 17 August decreed that Himmler’s special armed forces, the future Waffen S.S., were to be regarded solely as a Party force under Himmler’s command, and outside the control of either the Army or the Police; on 26 August Himmler was among the group that accompanied Hitler on an inspection of the Western fortifications. Perhaps these attentions led Himmler to exaggerate his authority. The part he had been expected to play, had the campaign against Czechoslovakia developed into invasion, was merely to provoke border incidents and to establish an immediate police control of the occupied territory in the wake of the Army. His plans, however, had now to be abandoned. According to Ciano, an acute if malicious observer, Himmler was ‘in despair because an agreement had been reached and war seemed to be averted’. But Hitler was determined to keep the S.S. Command and the Army firmly separate. By September 1939, Himmler would have control of some 18,000 men trained for the field (the S.S. Verfugungstruppen, which were in 1940 to be re-named the Waffen S.S.) in addition to the men in his Death’s Head units and the various branches of the S.S. and the Gestapo.

Himmler had caught the war-fever from Hitler, and joined with Ribbentrop in encouraging the Fuhrer to go to any lengths to achieve the conquest of Europe. Goring and the High Command played the double game of appeasing Hitler by hastening the preparations for war, while at the same time doing everything in their power to postpone the outbreak of hostilities. In Goring’s case, he conducted the negotiations for both war and peace alongside each other, knowing full well that Germany was ill-prepared for campaigns which might well spread to both the Eastern and Western fronts. For Himmler, whose military sense was as small as his knowledge of strategy, war was merely an assertion of racial superiority, about which he had no doubts at all of the outcome. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin at this period, wrote: ‘In September 1938, as well as in August 1939, Ribbentrop and Himmler were, in my opinion, his [Hitler’s] principal lieutenants in the war party,’²⁸ and, according to Henderson, Hitler’s actions often sprang from their fabrication of situations which were calculated to urge him to make war. Lord Halifax endorsed this opinion in a report written in January 1939 for submission to Roosevelt and the French Government. Goerdeler, one of the most prominent men in the German resistance, writing at the time of Munich, again coupled Ribbentrop and Himmler as the principal agents driving Hitler into war. It was fitting, therefore, that Himmler should accompany Hitler and Ribbentrop to Prague on 15 March after the fearful scene during the hours after midnight at the Chancellery in Berlin, when Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goring had forced the aged Czech President in the midst of a heart attack to capitulate and give up what was left of his country to the savage encroachment of Germany. Himmler made Karl Hermann Frank, a leader of the Sudeten German Free Corps and a State Secretary under the new German Protector, von Neurath, Higher S.S. and Police Chief. Frank, though nominally responsible to Neurath, was in practice responsible only to Himmler. In this way the security administration of Czechoslovakia was directed from Berlin, and the arrests began again.

The following June, Himmler was present at an important meeting of the Reich Defence Council at which high-ranking members from the civil and military authorities were present. Goring presided, and the subject was preparation for imminent war. Himmler pledged the use of the prisoners in his camps for war work.

An operation that formed a part of Himmler’s initial contribution to Hitler’s plan for the attack on Poland was named after him. It is ironic that Operation Himmler should have been a cruel act of deception involving a revolting atrocity. The general plan to stage faked incidents along the Polish frontier in order to provide suitable provocation for the invading forces had already been in Himmler’s mind when he had hoped to take part in an attack on Czechoslovakia, but in that case his deceits were not needed. Now in the case of Poland, they were to be developed on a considerable scale, and Heinrich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, was put in charge of these operations. It was part of the plan that a number of prisoners from concentration camps should be dressed in Polish uniforms, given fatal injections by a doctor and at the right moment shot at until they were bordering on death. These victims were to be brought in under the code-words ‘canned goods’. Their bodies were to be photographed for publication and shown to press representatives accompanying the German Army.

The story of these faked attacks and of their attendant atrocities was revealed at Nuremberg after the war in an affidavit sworn by the S.D. man who led the principal raid on 31 August against the German radio-station at Gleiwitz, close to the Polish border.²⁹ Having affirmed this story at Nuremberg, he escaped and was not heard of again until he re-appeared under his own name in 1964, and sold the story to Der Stern. At Nuremberg, he told how he raided the station, taking with him a Polish-speaking German who broadcast a provocative speech against the Reich, and how at the last minute he deposited a dying man on the scene whom the Poles were supposed to have killed. This was Operation Himmler, the first criminal act with which the Second World War began on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.

IV. Secret Rivals

The subtle balances of power between the Nazi leaders at the beginning of the war are not easy to measure. After his successes in Austria and Czechoslovakia, Hitler withdrew himself from the others, becoming more arbitrary and autocratic in his procedure and less susceptible to advice or pressures designed to change his line of action. If Ribbentrop and Himmler rather than Goring or Goebbels were said to be in favour of war during 1938-9, this was due solely to their more ready response to Hitler’s will. They blindly supported and encouraged his advance towards war and had none of the reservations about Germany’s readiness for full-scale hostilities which occupied Goring’s mind. Goebbels after the summer of 1938 had been temporarily in disgrace with the Fuhrer because he had asked to be relieved of his duties so that he might divorce his wife and marry the Czech actress, Lida Baarova. After his experiences with Roehm and Blomberg, and later with Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army who had had a troublesome divorce and married a young girl, Hitler was tired of seeing the love affairs of his subordinates interfere with their concentration on the grand strategy that he now had in mind. Himmler’s discreet liaison in Berlin with his secretary Hedwig was to be far less disruptive. According to Lina Heydrich, Himmler indeed became a different man as a result of his orderly love affair. Hedwig even led him to abandon the little chain which secured his pince-nez to his ear, and influenced him to wear his hair with a less severe cut.

Himmler’s relationship with Heydrich during the first year of the war became deeply involved. When Himmler had first appointed Heydrich to the S.S., they had both been young men, Himmler thirty-one years old and Heydrich twenty-seven. Even now, at the beginning of the war, Himmler was still not yet forty and Heydrich thirty-five. The closer observers of these two very different men, such as Gisevius, Kersten and Hottl, differ very little in their assessment of Heydrich.¹ To Hottl, who worked for Heydrich and later for Schellenberg on the forgery of passports and banknotes, Himmler was a mediocrity in comparison with Heydrich, who had little use for his commander’s obsessions, racial or otherwise, and rapidly learned how to exploit the power delegated to him. In the end, according to Hottl, he undermined Himmler’s position to such an extent that he achieved direct access to Hitler and, had he lived, might well in 1943 have been appointed Minister of the Interior by the Fuhrer in order to break, or counterbalance, the power accumulated by Himmler. However, Heydrich’s position in relation to Himmler was weakened, not strengthened, when in September 1941 Hitler, without consulting Himmler, appointed him Deputy Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was instructed to master that unhappy country, which was proving rebellious under the comparatively weak rule of Reich Protector Neurath, who had been Hitler’s Foreign Minister before the appointment of Ribbentrop. Neurath was forced to leave matters entirely in the hands of Heydrich.

Heydrich’s gradual movement towards comparative independence came during the first two years of the war. Himmler, who was never a man for immediate action, delegated to him an increasing number of the monstrous tasks required by Hitler, and even tolerated a situation in which Heydrich reported direct to the Fuhrer or to Goring. Himmler, it must always be remembered, was a sick man who from 1939 to the end of his life could only find relief from his physical and psychological tensions through Kersten’s expert massage.

It is a profound mistake to underestimate Himmler, the very mistake, in fact, which allows such apparently insignificant men as he to win extensive power in politics or industry. Behind the rimless pince-nez, the trim and correct moustache, the receding, obstinate chin, and the narrow, sloping shoulders there was a man of passionate beliefs, whose attitude to power was not to luxuriate in it like Goring, or to fulfil the ambitions of an orator and