Heinrich Himmler

In 1943 the experiments were extended to epidemic hepatitis virus research at Sachsenhausen. ‘I approve that eight criminals condemned in Auschwitz [eight Jews of the Polish Resistance Movement condemned to death] should be used for these experiments’, wrote Himmler to a doctor on 16 June 1943. ‘Casualties must be expected’, he had been warned a fortnight earlier. Phlegmon was artificially induced by doctors at Dachau, the subjects chosen in this case being Catholic priests; Gebhardt claimed that he had protested to Himmler about this, but that the Reichsfuhrer S.S., eager to ‘dig up old popular remedies out of the rubbish heap’ as a challenge to the academic medicine which he despised, had refused to have the work stopped.

Ravensbruck was so conveniently near to Gebhardt’s clinic at Hohenlychen, that he took advantage of experiments in bone transplantation which had been developed in the camp, with the ‘special approval’ of Himmler, to steal the shoulder-blade of a female prisoner and transfer it to one of his private patients.

In the autumn of 1943 Himmler personally intervened in a dispute about the choice of subjects for the typhus vaccine experiments at the special centre which had been set up in Buchenwald under Grawitz in 1941. Himmler’s instructions were that only persons under sentence of at least ten years’ penal servitude were to be used. Similar experiments were undertaken at Natzweiler camp in 1943 under the initial supervision of a professor of hygiene. In July 1944, Himmler authorized the use of gypsies for testing the possibility of drinking sea-water; since he regarded the gypsies as scarcely human, he added that ‘for checking’ three other, more normal people, should be added to the subject-list.

^{Himmler as a standard-bearer at the barricades the November putsch in Munich}

^{Himmler’s house at Gmuud}

The process of extermination that had begun with the insane in 1940 was continued in the case of many mentally defective and deformed children; Himmler’s orders, as far as defective children in the camps were concerned, were quite explicit; they must be done away with along with other ‘incurables’. In June 1942 Himmler gave consent to the ‘special treatment’ of tubercular Poles. Only in 1943, when the working capacity of all prisoners was regarded as important, was a special order from Himmler circulated to the Camp Commandants that ‘in future only insane prisoners can be selected for Action 14f 13’, the reference number for euthanasia. ‘All other prisoners unfit for work (persons suffering from tuberculosis, bedridden invalids, etc.) are definitely to be excluded from this action. Bedridden prisoners were to be given suitable work which can be performed in bed.’ There is evidence, however, that the extermination of sick and unwanted prisoners did in fact continue.

In July 1942, as we have seen, an Institute for Practical Research in Military Science was founded by Himmler inside his Ancestral Heritage Community, the Ahnenerbe. This Institute, working in close association with the Reich University of Strasbourg, began to assemble the collection of skeletons and skulls of Jews under the supervision of an expert on anatomy, who on 9 February 1942 had urged Himmler to help his researches by enabling him to procure ‘the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars who personify a repulsive yet characteristic subhumanity’. Himmler formally agreed on 23 February, and by the autumn Sievers, the manager of Ahnenerbe, was able to report to Eichmann in a memorandum headed ‘Assembling of a skeleton collection’ that a consignment of 115 persons, including 30 Jewesses, was to be made available. They were gassed the following year at Oranienburg by Joseph Kramer, who subsequently described under examination, with the cold exactitude of a good technician, precisely how he and his men carried out their tasks. The gas was provided by Hirt, and the bodies were sent direct to the Institute for preservation in tanks. A witness at the Institute described the first delivery, the remains of the thirty murdered Jewesses: ‘The bodies were still warm when they arrived. Their eyes were wide open and glazing. Their eyeballs were bloodshot, red and protuberant. There were also traces of blood about the noses and mouths… There was no sign of rigor mortis.’ Consignments of male bodies followed at intervals.

Himmler was very proud of the research that he had instituted and his relationship to the Ahnenerbe organization. Giving his evasive evidence during the Doctors’ Trial, Gebhardt said:

‘He became, I am now told, President of Ahnenerbe, the Ancestral Heritage Community. He was the centre of… the so-called Friends of Himmler circle which he founded. It was a dangerous mixture of eccentric individuals and industrialists. From that quarter he obtained both the funds and the encouragement to undertake the thousand and one schemes which he put into operation. I have an idea that the extraordinary, newly-founded Institute where all these scientific friends of his met was in fact the Ancestral Heritage Community. Himmler, in a word, as I have often pointed out, was attached to a crazy, completely false notion of antiquity… The danger lay in the fact that it was always he who made the decisions.’

Thus Himmler, who was too reserved a man to extend his power over the surface of Germany in the flamboyant manner of Goring, sent his roots deep into the subterranean earth of the camps, creating there a life- in-death for a vast but hidden community that was to absorb and destroy millions of Europeans, and most of all the Jews. This was to become the secret empire of death rejected by the conscience of the German people who, though they were in varying degrees aware of its existence, did so little to oppose it. Himmler, armed with the executive savagery of Heydrich, largely severed himself and his activities from the attention of the other leaders, leaving them to exercise control over the life of Germany and its captured territories while he developed the processes of death in order to purify the race he believed he was born to make paramount. He sank himself deeper and deeper into his racial obsessions and their outward manifestations in the Lebensborn institutions, the researches of the Institute for the Study of Heredity, and the overwhelming task of eliminating the suffocating presence of the Jews and Slavs in Eastern Europe. From the West he was for some while largely excluded because of Hitler’s desire to come to some sort of favourable terms with this area while he crushed opposition in the East through the invasion of Soviet Russia. Only later was Himmler permitted to extend the full measure of his persecution to the resistance movements in the West.

Himmler’s differences with the other leaders, particularly with Goring and Ribbentrop, were caused by his encroachments on what they regarded as their privileged territory. Himmler’s information services were in some ways superior to those of either Goring or Ribbentrop because the men he employed, such as Schellenberg, were often of superior skill and intelligence. At the time of the Battle of Britain, Himmler’s assessment of British aircraft production was over double that of Goring, whose easy optimism that he could destroy the Royal Air Force in a matter of days was partly based on his estimate that the output of planes in Britain was only some 300 a month. Goring did not welcome the challenge of such contradicting figures, nor did Ribbentrop approve of Himmler’s interference in foreign affairs. They differed in 1940 over policy in Rumania, and in October Himmler was sent by Hitler on a further mission to Spain to try to involve Franco in the war. During the same period he went to Norway to strengthen the campaign against the growing resistance movement; he introduced the fearful system of persecuting men and women opposed to Germany by arresting their dependent kinsfolk and children and holding them as hostages.

Ribbentrop equally resented the extension of Himmler’s Intelligence services abroad under Schellenberg, and his attempts to influence German policy in the occupied countries. The breach in the relations between the two ministers came to a head in the winter of 1941-2, when, according to Frau von Ribbentrop, Himmler even ‘tried to enlist my husband in his personal intrigues… My husband considered it impossible from the point of view of foreign relations that Himmler should succeed Hitler’. Ribbentrop in his Memoirs summarized his points of difference with Himmler at the time, including among them Himmler’s uncompromising attitude to freemasonry and the Church, his treatment of the Jews, and his evil influence in such countries as France, Denmark and Hungary. He complained that his ambassadors were kept under surveillance by the S.D., and that secret reports on them were sent direct to the Fuhrer. Ribbentrop bitterly resented the fact that this was done behind his back, especially when these reports led Hitler to take decisions based on what he called ‘false information’. He complains that in Rumania, for example, Himmler supported Horia Sima after he had decided in conference with Hitler that the man they should support was Antonescu.¹⁸

In an attempt to force Ribbentrop’s hand, Schellenberg contrived one of those Machiavellian tricks in which he took such delight in order to discredit Ribbentrop’s own secret service. He was, he claimed, under instruction from Himmler ‘to do my best to destroy this organization.’ He succeeded in feeding certain of Ribbentrop’s agents