Heinrich Himmler

order which at that time caused quite a controversy and got the scandalmongers going again with further loads of abuse, directed largely at me. That order of mine simply said: every S.S. man before going to the front should procreate a child.

‘It seemed to me a thoroughly simple and decent order, and by now, after many years of terrible losses sustained by the German people, those who failed to comprehend my order at the time will have come to see that it makes sense. After all, I gave these matters a great deal of careful thought. My consideration was simply this: it’s a law of nature that the most valuable blood is lost for the nation so long as it cannot be procreated. It stands to reason that the man who is racially the most valuable will be the bravest soldier, and the one most likely to be killed in action. A nation which, in the course of twenty-five years has lost millions of its best sons, simply cannot afford such a loss of its blood; hence if the nation is to survive, and if the sacrifice of its best blood is not to be wasted, something had to be done about it.’

At the time he was making this speech about the procreation in the S.S., Hedwig, Himmler’s recognized mistress, was in the last stages of pregnancy with her second child. She gave birth to a daughter, who was named Nanette Dorothea. Her son Helge had been born on 15 February 1942.¹⁴

The establishment of this second family placed a strain on Himmler’s deliberately restricted income. Schellenberg throws some light on this situation. Himmler, during a period of truce with Bormann, with whom he was later to form a kind of tactical relationship, asked for a loan of 80,000 marks from Party funds, ostensibly to build a house. Bormann granted him the loan, but at a very high rate of interest which Himmler could scarcely afford to pay out of his official salary. Schellenberg was astonished at this extraordinary arrangement which he found ‘incomprehensible’, and made his own observation on Himmler’s domestic problems:

‘Himmler’s first marriage had been unhappy, but for his daughter’s sake he had not sought divorce. He now lived with a woman who was not his wife, and they had two very nice children to whom he was completely devoted. He did what he could for these children within the limits of his own income, but although, after Hitler, Himmler had more real power than anyone else in the Third Reich, and through the control of many economic organisations could have had millions at his disposal, he found it difficult to provide for their needs.’¹⁵

When Schellenberg suggested a mortgage would be cheaper than the loan, Himmler rejected the suggestion with an ‘air of resignation’. It was, he said, ‘a completely private matter and he wanted to act with meticulous rectitude; in no circumstances did he want to discuss it with the Fuhrer’. Meanwhile, he supported his family at Gmund, and although his wife knew of his liaison with Hedwig, he maintained formal good relations with her for the sake of their daughter Gudrun.

In November 1939, Himmler had assigned a special mission to Schellenberg, who abducted from Venlo, a town just across the Dutch frontier, two British Intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact, posing as an anti-Nazi German officer. The British agents, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens, were accused of being involved in an attempt on Hitler’s life at Munich on 8 November. Though is is now widely assumed that the attempted assassination had been pre-arranged with Hitler’s approval, seven men lost their lives in the explosion that occurred after the Fuhrer and other leaders had left. Hitler needed this excuse for propaganda to stir the German people against the Allies and to show what desperate enemies Himmler’s agents had to face. On 21 November Himmler announced that the British Intelligence service was behind the plot, and that prisoners had been taken.

The Venlo incident itself was to become one of the more entertaining spy stories of the war, both Schellenberg and Captain Payne Best giving their own detailed accounts of what happened. Both the British officers spent the next five years in concentration camps, and Schellenberg was promoted to S.S. Major-General for his efforts in having captured them. Schellenberg’s specialization in foreign espionage led to the practice of placing S.D. and Gestapo men as attaches in various German legations and embassies abroad, which enabled Himmler once more to encroach on Ribbentrop’s territory. In March 1940, as a follow-up to the Venlo incident, Schellenberg enabled Himmler to present a detailed report to Hitler establishing the close connection that existed between British and Dutch military Intelligence. Hitler was later to use this incident to help justify his attack on the Netherlands for violating their neutrality.

In the early months of 1940 Hitler was preparing for the assault on the West. The loss in February of the plans for the campaign against Holland and Belgium — when a special courier who was carrying them made a forced landing in Belgium owing to poor visibility — caused consternation among the Nazi leaders. While Goring raved at the carelessness of the Luftwaffe and dismissed the commander of the Air Fleet whose officer had done the damage, Himmler, according to Schellenberg, was so excited and confused he was quite unable to give clear instructions about the immediate necessity to draw up security regulations for the Army.

Himmler’s military ambitions were still frustrated. The S.S. fighting forces acquired their official title of Waffen or Armed S.S. during the Western offensive, in which only two S.S. divisions served alongside some eighty-seven divisions of the Army. They were given favoured positions in which to display their ruthlessness in battle, while the special armoured S.S. regiment, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler under Sepp Dietrich, played as spectacular a part as possible in the fall of Rotterdam and Boulogne. Theodor Eicke’s Death’s Head division made up of German camp guards behaved with shameless ferocity, as the massacre of British troops at Le Paradis in May 1940 showed; the celebrated Private Pooley was one of only two survivors.

But in spite of this activity by the S.S., Himmler seems to have taken no direct part in the campaign, which lasted from April 1940, with the initial occupation of Denmark and Norway, to 21 June, when the conquest of Belgium, Holland and France was complete and the armistice was signed by Hitler in the Forest of Compiegne, a ceremony at which Himmler was not present.

While Heydrich had sprung once more into his Luftwaffe aircraft to enjoy aggression in the field — from which he sent Himmler a postcard on 5 May promising to be back at his desk within eight days — the Reichsfuhrer S.S. trundled west in his armoured train, once more following in the wake of Hitler. He managed to send a letter to ‘Mein lieber Heydrich’ on 15 May explaining that he had spent some days at the Fuhrer’s headquarters and adding, with an ironic reference to the Polish campaign, ‘the only difference is that we are at a different place’. The close of the letter throws some light on his feelings for Heydrich. ‘I think about you very much. I hope everything is going well. And I wish you renewed success, happiness — and everything good. Love from Wolfchen and Haschen. Yours, Heinrich Himmler.’ Then he placed a formal order that Heydrich was to send a daily report by telephone stating what he had done and how he was. Heydrich was to fly with the Luftwaffe until the end of the campaign in June, and be present to enjoy all the fruits of victory in Montmartre. He spent July in the urgent preparation of plans for the control of Britain by the Gestapo and S.D. after the conquest in the autumn. On 27 September S.S. Colonel Professor Dr Franz Six, former head of the faculty of economics in the University of Berlin, was appointed to head the Action Group activities in Britain which would follow immediately upon the invasion.

Meanwhile Himmler was facing certain difficulties in extending his wartime powers. Hitler was determined to restrict the members of the Waffen S.S. to some four divisions (at most about 5 per cent of the armed forces), while Himmler himself was personally committed to such high standards of selection that the average recruit to the German Army fell far below his Nordic ideal. It was during 1940 that Himmler and his sport- and-nature-loving Chief of Staff for the Waffen S.S., Gottlieb Berger, decided that all men of Nordic race might qualify for admission to their forces, whether they were German or not. By the end of 1940 there was a so-called Viking Division in the Waffen S.S. under the German divisional Commander, Felix Steiner, and volunteers from Holland, Denmark, Norway and Finland had begun to join. By the closing months of the war, in 1945, there were thirty-five Waffen S.S. divisions, most of them substantially recruited from the occupied countries. Himmler made his racial theories work in his favour, and they enabled him to fulfil his ambitions of commanding on his own account a substantial body of men separate from the regular Army, over which he exercised no influence except for a few disastrous months during 1944 — 5. In a private memorandum that survives, dated 13 April 1942, Himmler insists that all the German leaders and sub- leaders of these foreign S.S. units must receive special ideological training and report to him personally before taking up their duties. They must, he says, have ‘a firm faith in our ideal’.

On 7 September 1940, Himmler went to France to address the officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte