peculiar views he acquired as a result of his scholarship. He talked to Kersten on every subject that occupied his thoughts. As far as his time permitted, Himmler was an assiduous reader, though, like Hitler, he used books only to confirm and develop his particular prejudices. Reading was for him a narrowing, not a widening experience. He saw himself as a teacher and reformer born to change the world.
The study of medicine along the lines he favoured was a constant subject for discussion with Kersten. He was against the conventional remedies put on the market by industry for private profit. He believed in herbal remedies that came straight from natural sources, and he had for long been a serious student of medieval herbalism. Kersten could not help being impressed by his knowledge, but scarcely by his conclusions. Himmler fancied himself as a medical adviser and he was always prepared to prescribe such natural remedies as applying a wet, cold stocking to the forehead to cure a headache. Kersten acknowledged that Himmler knew a certain amount about the subject, but the reforms he planned to introduce after the war would have staggered the medical profession had they known them. He intended to enroll in the S.S. the doctors who believed in homoeopathic remedies so that they might form effective shock troops to coerce the rest of the profession into seeing sense, while the German public were to be encouraged to grow their own health remedies in their back gardens. Meanwhile he experimented as far as he could with dietary and health practice in the S.S. and the
It was natural for Himmler to see the future of society in terms of people of chosen blood. He believed that the healthiest and most intelligent and industrious stock originated from the land, and he wanted to found a vast European system of state farming to provide the right environment for the universal aristocracy of the future. Politicians, civil servants, scholars and industrialists alike would all be expected to keep in active contact with the land in addition to their urban professions. ‘Their children’, he said, ‘will go to the country as a horse to pasture.’ Kersten raised all the obvious objections to this, saying that the nation’s agriculture would be jeopardized by the ignorant activities of these amateur, weekend farmers. Himmler hoped to overcome this weakness by means of professional bailiffs, who would in the end be responsible for the maintenance of the farms. As for the industrial workers, they would have state allotments on which to dig and flourish, and all soldiers would automatically have the status of peasants. The S.S. would arrange everything, he said. ‘Villages inhabited by an armed peasantry will form the basis for the settlement in the East, the kernel of Europe’s defensive wall.’
The focus of Himmler’s political vision was centred in the past as he understood it. The vision had a deadly simplicity about it, taking no account of the organic growth of the many different peoples who had evolved the present divisions of Europe during centuries of war and political barter. Europe, he held, must be dominated either by the Germanic races or the Slavs; this was Himmler’s set belief. It always seemed to him utterly unreasonable for the Germanic English to side with the alien Slav against their racial brothers. As he put it to Kersten:
‘Our measures are not really so original. All great nations have used some degree of force or waged war in acquiring their status as a great power, in much the same way as ourselves; the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Poles, to a great extent, too, the English and the Americans. Centuries ago Charlemagne set us the example of resettling an entire people by his action with the Saxons and the Franks, the English with the Irish, the Spaniards with the Moors; and the American method of dealing with their Indians was to evacuate whole races… But we are certainly original in one important point: our measures are the expression of an idea, not the search for any personal advantage or ambition: we desire only the realization on a Germanic basis of a social ideal and the unity of the West. We will clarify the situation at whatever cost. It may take as many as three generations before the West gives its approval to this new order, for which the
Had Nazi Germany won the war, this would have been the pattern of Europe which Himmler intended to impose by force had he succeeded Hitler as Fuhrer; his aim was for Germany to set up a large economic confederation of European and North African states led by Germany and representing a total population and power three times greater than that of the United States. Kersten carefully recorded Himmler’s statements:
‘The European empire would form a confederation of free states, among which would be Greater Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Holland, Flanders, Wallonia, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. These countries were to govern themselves. They would have in common a European currency, certain areas of the administration including the police, foreign policy and the army in which the various nations would be represented by national formations. Trade relations would be governed by special treaties, a sphere in which Germany as the economically strongest country would hold back in order to favour the development of the weaker ones. Free towns were also envisaged, having special functions of their own, among them the task of representing a nation’s culture …
‘When Bolshevism had been extirpated in Russia, the Western Territories would come under German administration modelled on the Marches which Charlemagne had instituted in the east of his empire; the methods followed would be those by which England had evolved her colonies into dominions. When peace and economic health were fully restored, these territories would be handed back to the Russian people, who would live there in complete freedom, and a twenty-five year peace and commercial treaty would be concluded with the new government.’3
The great expanse of Russia was to be partitioned and placed under the administrative control of Germany, Britain and the United States, after these nations had come to terms with Hitler. Germany would control the area up to the River Ob, while the English were to have the areas between the rivers Ob and Lena. The Americans would be allocated the region east of the Lena and including Kamschatka and the sea of Okhotsh. As Himmler told Kersten early in the war, Germany had no intention of weakening England’s position as a great power. On the contrary, England was to be one of the cornerstones in the new Germanic Europe. The British fleet would protect Europe at sea while the Germanic armies would protect the land. Himmler’s theories, geared only to the past, found difficulty in defining a creative future for America. As Kersten puts it, ‘The whole American way of thinking was so alien to him that he could not even begin to understand it.’
Once Europe had been stabilized as the political, economic and cultural centre of the world, governed by a landed aristocracy and policed by a soldier-peasantry, the spread of the pure Germanic stock by intensive breeding would begin. The germs for this brave Germanic world had already been established in the original S.S. marriage and breeding codes and in the conception of the
Alongside the men, Nordic womanhood was to be developed, the ‘Chosen’, as Himmler called them, ‘the strong, purposeful type of women’, the best of them trained in Women’s Academies for Wisdom and Culture and acting as representatives of Germanic womanhood throughout the world. The true Nordic woman would be willing to be directed into a suitable marriage designed to promote the ideal growth of the human race. Himmler maintained ‘that men could be bred just as successfully as animals and that a race of men could be created possessing the highest spiritual, intellectual and physical qualities.’ When he saw blond children, says Kersten, ‘he became pale with emotion’.
As the best of Germany’s manhood was dying at the front, both Hitler and Himmler agreed that a stand must be made after the war to change the marriage laws and introduce legalized bigamy. The good stock so cruelly lost in war must at all costs be replaced.
‘My personal opinion’, said Himmler to Kersten in May 1943, ‘is that it would be a natural development for us to break with monogamy. Marriage in its existing form is the Catholic Church’s satanic achievement; marriage laws are in themselves immoral… . With bigamy each wife would act as a stimulus to the other so that both would try to be their husband’s dream-woman — no more untidy hair, no more slovenliness. Their models, which will intensify these reflections, will be the ideals of beauty projected by art and the cinema.’
Himmler’s open and happy relationship with Hedwig, who at the time he was talking to Kersten on this subject had already borne him one child and was soon to become pregnant with her second, no doubt encouraged him to regard bigamy in a favourable light, both personally and politically. He loved to enlarge on this dream of multiple family life:
