their own quarters — some distance from Himmler’s — for ‘music, dancing and gaiety’. ‘I did not dance’, writes Bormann to his wife, ‘but you ought to have seen Jodl.’
Himmler nevertheless continued to watch over the self-discipline of those whose conduct he felt he should influence. In January he had written to Rauter, his representative in Holland: ‘I herewith order you to carry out your reprisal and anti-terror measures in the sharpest possible manner. Failure to do that would be the only misdemeanour you could possibly be guilty of. If there are complaints about your severity, that’s an honour to be proud of.’ In May 1944 he had written to Pancke, his Chief of Police in Denmark: ‘Will you please see to it that your wife adopts more modest and inconspicuous standards of living… I must ask you to educate your wife so that she refrains from trumpeting her personal opinions on this or that political event… I am not altogether convinced that, so far as your marriage is concerned, you have assumed leadership of your young wife to the extent I expect from a senior S.S. leader. Heil Hitler!’ In August he had sent a scathing signal to the Military Governor of Cracow: ‘I thoroughly disapprove of your orders which seem only concerned with evacuation. I demand supreme fortitude from all members of the administration. Getting your luggage away is supremely unimportant!’ When he himself was in trouble on the Western front, it did not prevent him writing a painful letter to S.S. General Hofle on 12 January, after deciding against sending a severe reprimand drafted on 30 December. His revised letter began: ‘According to my custom I have been brooding over a letter to you dictated more than a fortnight ago, and I have decided to write you a more personal letter instead, giving you one more chance.’ This letter ends: ‘Had I imagined how much this command that I confided to you exceeds your mental strength I would have spared both you and myself this grief.’
Letters and memoranda survive from Himmler’s files which show he must have been aware of the failure of the S.S. to commit the heroic self-sacrifice he wanted to impose on them. For example, an anonymous letter dated 14 January 1944 denounced the graft, fraud and theft in which many leading members of the S.S. indulged; the writer claimed he was an old man whose sons were all at the front and whose home was destroyed in the air-raids. The letter, which is plainly a serious one, lists about a dozen S.S. officers who were, the writer claims, betraying the Fatherland through their luxurious living. Ten days later, on 24 January, a senior S.S. officer writes to point out the folly of calling up men from the armament industry when the shortage at the front is not of men but munitions. On 16 February S.S. General Hofmann writes from Stuttgart to ask what is to be done with the surplus masses of foreign labour who have become a serious burden to the Reich now that the frontiers are contracting so rapidly and there is no work for them to do. Should they be abandoned to the enemy? There is no record of any reply to this letter.
On 23 February Himmler is himself writing to Bormann, whom he addresses as ‘Dear Martin’, about a report he has received from a young S.S. officer in Weimar, Wilhelm Vermohlen, on the poor morale of leading Party members who have been the first to take flight.
Himmler’s appointment on the battlefront coincided with Hitler’s disastrous policy of giving both Goring and Himmler direct command over their respective Luftwaffe and S.S. fighting forces. The Army had no disciplinary power over these divisions, which reported to their own leaders. Only for tactical purposes did they come under the direction of the Army. Himmler, like Goring, was now free to intervene on matters of strategy and object to orders given by the Army Commanders in so far as these affected his own men.
According to Westphal, Himmler issued ‘a deluge of absolutely puerile orders’, but the professional soldiers were directed by Keitel to take note of Himmler’s ‘new methods of leadership’. Himmler was ‘hag-ridden by a pathological distrust’ and never hesitated to blame the Army for the failure of his own impractical orders because ‘he always felt he was being put at a disadvantage’. Westphal claims he was wasteful of supplies sent to him:
‘He was in any case receiving greater quantities than were allotted to other sections of the front, because otherwise it was feared he would ring up Hitler and have all the munition trains diverted to his sector. Yet he fired off every shell that was sent to him and then simply asked for more. He sat in his special train in the Black Forest, and had himself shunted into a tunnel every time there was an air-raid alarm. It is almost superfluous to mention that Himmler never visited the front himself, but issued his orders from the safety of the rear.’24
Himmler can scarcely be said to have approached his gravely responsible duties on the so-called Vistula front in a realistic spirit. Once more he was appointed in order to improvise, filling the vacuum left by Hitler’s spent forces in the face of the final Russian offensive. Guderian, as Chief of the General Staff, had, of course, opposed this unprofessional appointment, but Hitler had remained firm. As Guderian saw it: ‘This preposterous suggestion appalled me… Hitler maintained that Himmler had given a very good account of himself on the Upper Rhine. He also controlled the Reserve Army and therefore had a source of reinforcements immediately to hand… Hitler ordered that Himmler assemble his own staff…’25
According to Guderian, Himmler surrounded himself with a staff of S.S. men utterly inexperienced for the task ahead of them. His headquarters were 150 miles north-east of Berlin at Deutsch-Krone, and he arrived on 24 January, passing German refugees on the road. The Russians had already over-run East Prussia and reached a line stretching south from Elbing on the Baltic to Thorn, Posen, the old German Army headquarters where Himmler had so often spoken, and Breslau. Northern Germany was at the mercy of the invading armies, and only fragmentary defences existed to stop their further advance.
Himmler’s knowledge was also fragmentary. According to Skorzeny, he ordered him to relieve a town barely thirty miles from Berlin and a hundred miles west of his own headquarters. Either Himmler had got the name wrong, or believed the Russian forces to be scattered over widely separated areas of Germany. The Russians were, in fact, waiting for the supplies their previous advances had outstripped, but they had already cut off the German forces in East Prussia, who were in urgent need of relief by Himmler’s army and were in only partial occupation of Posen, the German communication centre for the region. Himmler withdrew the garrisons at Thorn, Kulm and Marienwerder, which might, in favourable circumstances at least, have given him bridgeheads from which to relieve the men in East Prussia, and replaced the garrison commander in Posen with a diehard S.S. commander at the head of 2,000 officer cadets. He also placed police guards along the line of the River Oder to shoot soldiers seen deserting and put their bodies on display. When he tried to stage a limited local offensive from Deutsch-Krone in the direction of Schneidemuehl, his men were defeated, and he had to re-site his headquarters and withdraw his forces hastily a hundred miles west to the Oder, ordering the garrison commanders of the forces he left behind to be court- martialled if they abandoned their posts. In the north the Russian forces followed on his heels to establish bridgeheads as far east as the Oder. Himmler, on orders from Hitler, extended his defences dangerously along the fringe of the Baltic coast in order to hold as long as possible the U-boat bases that stretched as far distant as Elbing itself.
By 31 January Russian advance forces were beginning to threaten Berlin with spearhead advances from the line of the Oder, less than fifty miles away. Panic set in, but the Russian offensive in this sector came to a halt.
Himmler’s second headquarters on the Eastern front was at the luxurious villa owned by Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, near the S.S. Ordensburg Crossinsee at Falkenburg.26 Here he lived, in effect, the life of a civil-servant who happened to be administering a war. He got up between eight and nine o‘clock, received treatment from Kersten if he were there or from Gebhardt, whose nursing home at Hohenlychen was in fact conveniently near. Between ten and eleven o’clock he received his war reports and took his decisions. After lunch he rested for a while, then conferred again with his staff officers. In the evening he was too tired to concentrate, and after dinner he went to bed. By ten o’clock he was inaccessible.
Hitler, oblivious of the threat to the capital, still planned his principal offensive in the south,27 but Guderian was convinced that it was necessary to attack the Russian spearheads east of the capital immediately with all the force that could be assembled. He was also sure that Himmler was quite incapable of directing this action, which must be undertaken promptly and skilfully before the Russians had built up their strength for further advances.
Guderian determined to insist on his plan at a staff conference called by Hitler in the Chancellery in Berlin on 13 February. Himmler left his nursing home to be present and, as Guderian expected, opposed the offensive on the grounds that neither ammunition nor fuel could be made available in time. Guderian has recorded the conversation that followed in front of Himmler:
GUDERIAN: We can’t wait until the last can of petrol and the last shell have been issued. By that time the
