‘The fact that a man has to spend his entire existence with one wife drives him first of all to deceive her and then makes him a hypocrite as he tries to cover it up. The result is indifference between the partners. They avoid each other’s embraces and the final consequence is that they don’t produce children. This is the reason why millions of children are never born, children whom the state urgently requires. On the other hand the husband never dares to have children by the woman with whom he is carrying on an affair, much though he would like to, simply because middle-class morality forbids it. Again it’s the state which loses, for it gets no children from the second woman either.’4
He attacked fiercely the fact that illegitimate children were denied the full rights due to them as their father’s offspring, and the social disgrace the unmarried mother had to endure seemed to him intolerable:
‘A man in this situation has no access to his child. He’s up against the law again if he wants to adopt the child, so long as he has children of his own or even has the possibility of having them. In other words, the law is in direct contradiction to our crying need — children and still more children. We must show courage and act decisively in this matter, even if it means arousing still greater opposition from the Church — a little more or less is of no consequence.’5
His rooted objection to homosexuality among S.S. men invariably led to habitual offenders being confined in concentration camps. The homosexual was only useful in a degenerate society where breeding was to be discouraged. A Nordic homosexual was ‘a traitor to his own people’, and he refused to listen to Kersten’s advocacy of psychiatric treatment for men with homosexual tendencies who were capable of redirection to normal sexual relations. Particular trouble arose over one dedicated officer who was discovered in 1940 to be advocating the formation of a homosexual
Himmler’s hostility to the Christian religion, and especially to the Catholic Church, led him to make his own particular form of study of other religions. This again drew him back into the past. He liked occasionally to entertain German scholars and challenge them with his ideas. He enjoyed discussion and friendly controversy, and he was not bigoted enough to refuse Gudrun, his daughter, her right to say Christian Grace before meals. He searched the sacred books of other faiths for ideas which would support his own acquired beliefs. He studied the
When Kersten, who was himself interested in comparative religion, asked him in the summer of 1942 whether he had any religious belief at all, Himmler was indignant that Kersten should even doubt that he had. It was only common sense, he said, to believe:
‘that some higher Being — whether you call it God or Providence or anything else you like — is behind nature and the marvellous order in the world of man and animals and plants. If we refused to recognize that we should be no better than the Marxists… I insist that members of the S.S. must believe in God. I’m not going to have men around me who refuse to recognize any higher Being or Providence or whatever you like to call it.’
He longed, he said, to be Minister for Religious Matters and ‘dedicate myself to positive achievements only… Of course it’s pleasanter to concern yourself with flower-beds rather than political dust-heaps and refuse-dumps, but flowers themselves won’t thrive unless these things are seen to’. He spoke of the Gestapo as ‘the national charwoman’, cleaning up the state. Meanwhile, he took the
Kersten studied Himmler’s character closely with the intention of controlling him in so far as he could, and began to introduce the question of the Jews into their discussions. Himmler was quite prepared to discuss this subject in the same way as he discussed any other, with an apparent rationality which soon became irrational. Just as the growth of freemasonry was obnoxious in a healthy nation because it represented a powerful, self-seeking secret society intent on spreading its own power and influence inside the State, so the development of powerful Jewish interests in Germany seemed to Himmler like a cancerous growth that had spread its parasitic network through the natural economy of the land. This conception of the alien Jew sapping the vitality of the German nation had become an obsession with Himmler, as with all the more bigoted Nazis. None of Kersten’s arguments, which Himmler was quite prepared to hear, moved him in the slightest from this predetermined and irrational obsession. He could not tolerate what he regarded as Jewish infiltration into the German economy and culture entirely for racial and political ends. The two races, the two worlds, he said, could never mingle; they must be separated by force before further irreparable harm was done.
It was this obsession, combined with his academic passion for ‘neatness’, that converted Himmler from the idea of the expulsion of the Jews from the Germanic territories and made him favour their absolute destruction through genocide.
Himmler was a man of violence, not by nature, but by conviction. Although, like Kersten, he took part in hunting as a manly sport, he was a poor shot, and he could never understand Kersten’s passion for deer-stalking. ‘How can you find any pleasure, Herr Kersten,’ said Himmler, ‘in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood… Properly considered, it’s pure murder.’
He practised hunting, however, because it was a traditional Germanic sport, and because the game must be ‘kept within bounds’. But he despised the theatrical sportsman, like Goring, who turned hunting into an egotistical cult. Children, he believed, should be brought up to love animals, not to kill them merely for sport.
The destruction of human beings, who were themselves so much more destructive than the animals, was in fact forced on Himmler, and he accepted this fearful task because he believed it to be the only, as well as the ‘final’, solution to the problem of securing the racial purification of Germany which remained his deep-rooted ideal. Belief in the maintenance of racial purity in the modern world, if it is to be carried to its logical conclusion, must lead either to complete segregation or to genocide. Himmler, in the circumstances of total war, came to accept genocide as the only solution. The primitive hatred and fear from which such absolute ideas originate forced Himmler, who was neither primitive nor passionate by nature, to take the supreme crime of mass murder upon his uneasy conscience.
Kersten discovered what was affecting his patient as early as November 1941: ‘After much pressure… he told me that the destruction of the Jews is being planned.’
The admission put Kersten himself in a position of responsibility for which he was utterly unprepared. So far he had managed to persuade Himmler to release a few men from imprisonment as a personal favour to himself. The problem which he faced now was crime on a scale he did not know how to approach; he could only react at once against the raw fact that Himmler had unwillingly revealed to him:
‘Filled with horror, I emphatically begged Himmler to give up this idea and the plan to be discerned behind it. The suffering and counter-suffering were not to be contemplated. To this Himmler answered that he knew it would mean much suffering for the Jews. But what had the Americans done earlier? They had exterminated the Indians — who only wanted to go on living in their native land — in the most abominable way. “It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life. Yet we must create new life, we must cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”’7
Himmler spoke of the Jewish concept of ‘atonement’ and the Jewish saying of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth
