for a tooth’. Had not the Jews been responsible, he argued, for millions of dead in building up their empire?
Himmler took his own time to adjust the necessity for genocide to his code of morality. He did so deliberately and painfully. As he said to Kersten, ‘It’s the old tragic conflict between will and obligation. At this moment I am learning how terrible it can be… The extermination of people is unGermanic. You can demand everything from me, even pity. But you cannot demand protection for organized nihilism. That would be suicide.’
As he watched Himmler absorb the necessity to commit this crime into the niceties of his conscience, Kersten got ready to use his increasing influence over the Reichsfuhrer S.S. to keep his mind uneasy. This, he knew, was the only weapon he possessed with which to fight this man, whose soft but obstinate nature was only too familiar to him. He used every device he could to keep his patient pliable. But for the next two years the momentum of the war overcame him; he was able to ease a few individuals out of Himmler’s prison-camps, but not a whole race. Only in 1944, when the prospect of Germany’s defeat became evident to Himmler’s unwilling eyes, did Kersten’s struggle to turn the liberation of single individuals into that of large numbers begin to succeed.
The accuracy of his understanding of Himmler was therefore of the highest importance to his ultimate success. The superficial judgment passed on by Himmler to so many people, that he was like a teacher misplaced in a position of political power, was right only if the conception of a teacher is limited to an instructor and not an educator. Himmler was a born instructor, lucid and, within the limits he imposed on himself, well-informed. But in spite of his abundant and wide-ranging interests he was an informed not an educated man. He was always, as Kersten observed, using his knowledge to produce a set doctrine about which he loved to lecture any audience he could reach. Yet Kersten found him ‘not at all overbearing in these lectures of his, but quite amiable and not without a touch of humour’. In fact he encouraged his subordinates to express their opinions and argue respectfully with him, much as a headmaster whose opinions were hidebound might encourage his sixth-formers to debate with him so that he might have a good excuse to express his own opinions.
Fundamentally, however, Himmler’s character was deadly serious, in the direst meaning of these words. Like many men, he learned how to strengthen the weakness of his nature by fostering obsessions on which he could constantly lean for protection against his conscience and his reason. He used prejudice to lighten his burdens; if he needed an excuse for the exercise of kindness to a prisoner he would ask for a photograph and let clemency rule if the prisoner proved to be blond and Nordic. He could not tolerate his own physical weakness and ill-health, and yet he increasingly gave way to it in the refuge of Hohenlychen, to which in the end he would retire to recuperate from a cold. Kersten learnt exactly how to insert his subtly devised wedges with the grain of Himmler’s conscience, and he often gained concessions from him which might seem impossible. For Himmler lacked by nature the ruthless barbarity that his reason admired and that he extolled in the notorious speeches he made when the public image of the Reichsfuhrer S.S. had to be maintained. His family background and training taught him only the meticulous honesty, industry and sense of public service expected of the German teacher, the subordinate soldier and the civil servant. As a man of action Himmler was quite useless; as a soldier disastrous; as an administrator industrious, pedantic and obsessed by the desire to surround himself with the protective cover of administration.
Like all Nazis, he was an authoritarian who derived his inflexibility from obedience to his chosen leader. On the belts of the S.S. he had the phrase inscribed: ‘My honour is my loyalty.’ Hitler’s influence over him was paramount, and he anxiously fulfilled every task the Fuhrer gave him until the utter impossibility of doing so shattered the narrow energies of his spirit. In this, as Kersten observed, he confused statesmanship with the obedience of a bodyguard. In no essential matter did he ever dare to contradict Hitler to his face, and the difficulties both Kersten and Schellenberg encountered in their pursuit of Himmler’s weakness were due to the deep doubts he entertained of how best to reconcile loyalty to Hitler with loyalty to the fulfilment of the future of the German race. This conflict built up in him to fearful proportions when he realized that the Fuhrer was a sick man who might have to be dispossessed for his own ultimate good and that of Germany. The increasing rage of the Fuhrer as his sickness took possession of him only induced in Himmler the nervous condition which brought on the agonies of cramp. His subservience was complete, and as his tasks became more impossible to fulfil he dreaded the very thought of entering Hitler’s presence, where as like as not he would be reduced to a tongue-tied inability to speak at all.
In his private life he was simple and as kind as he knew how. He was considerate to his wife, in love with his mistress, and devoted to his children. He despised money and did his best, as far as wholly private expenditure was concerned, to eke out his living on his small official salary of some ?3,000 a year in the values of the time. It is significant that when, during 1943, Kersten obtained an inexpensive watch for Himmler in Sweden, the Reichsfuhrer S.S. thanked him, gave him M. 50 on account and promised to settle the rest of his debt when he received his next salary cheque. Although Himmler liked food, he ate and drank and smoked with extreme moderation, and expected all those in his service to do the same. He loved a life of hard labour and devotion to a narrow ideal which seemed to him moral and which was partly inherited from others and partly of his own creation.
He no more understood the evil he was generating through the S.S. and the Gestapo than a rigid Victorian moralist understood the repressive cruelty he must be imposing on the innocent members of his family. To the last he failed to understand why his name became so hated. He believed he was a good man who, if he had made mistakes, had made them in a noble cause. He dictated his memoranda from his various headquarters without any human consideration for the moral degeneration of his agents or the suffering of his victims. His efficiency was in his mind, and the chaos he caused was the result of enforcing what was at once both utterly cruel and administratively impossible.
As a man he was at the same time mediocre and extraordinary. Had he stayed in his rightful place in society he could have been an over-efficient and priggish executive, a small-time official or minor educationalist. But Himmler was not altogether mediocre. He possessed a fanatical vision and energy and an image of himself as a figure in power politics which made him in ten years one of the masters of Europe. A nonentity could not have become one of the most feared men in the history of modern times. Yet he failed utterly to develop a personality to match the scale of his office. He remained to the end a small, middle-class man, a petty bourgeois figure whose appearance made men laugh, a minister so utterly servile to his leader that he could not bear the thought of an ill- word or a reprimand.
If he did not consciously recognize this deep division in his nature, the nervous condition of his body did. This Kersten knew, and it gave him access to a certain degree of power over his patient which he tried to explain after the war:
‘His severe stomach-convulsions were not, as he supposed, simply due to a poor constitution or to overwork; they were rather the expression of this psychic division which extended over his whole life. I soon realized that while I could bring him momentary relief and even help over longer periods, I could never achieve a fundamental cure… When he was ill I first came into contact with the human side of Himmler’s character. When he was in good health, this was so overlaid with the rules and regulations which he invented or which were imposed upon him that nobody, not even his closest relations, could have got anything out of him which ran counter to them. In the event of any conflict arising he would have behaved, even to his own relations, exactly as the law demanded. His blind obedience was rooted in a part of his character which was quite inaccessible to other emotions.
‘As this obedience to law and order was, however, really based on something quite different, namely on Himmler’s ordinary middle-class feelings, it was possible for anybody who knew how to penetrate to those feelings to come to an understanding with him — even to the point of negotiating agreements with him which ran counter to the Fuhrer’s orders. Because he was utterly cut off from his natural roots and needed somebody on whom to lean, he was happy to have a man beside him who had no connection with the Party hierarchy, somebody who was simply a human being. At such moments I was able to appeal to him successfully.’8
Himmler, therefore, behind the mask of secrecy and power, was a man dominated as much by fear as by ambition. He tried hard to live in accordance with an image for which he was utterly unfitted. Few men in human history have shown to the extent that Himmler did what terrible crimes can be committed through a blind conviction that such deeds were both moral and inevitable.
VII. Slave of Power
