Heinrich Himmler

Russians will be too strong.

HITLER: I won’t permit you to accuse me of wanting to wait.

GUDERIAN: I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m simply saying that there’s no sense in waiting until the last lot of supplies have been issued and thus losing the favourable moment to attack.

HITLER: I have just told you that I won’t permit you to accuse me of wanting to wait.

GUDERIAN: General Wenck must be attached to the Reichsfuhrer’s staff, since otherwise there can be no prospect of the attack succeeding.

HITLER: The National Leader is man enough to carry out the attack on his own.²⁸

The dispute went on, according to Guderian, for two hours. Hitler became enraged:

‘His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, the man stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst of anger Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head and the veins stood out on his temples. I had made up my mind that I should let nothing destroy my equanimity and that I would simply repeat my essential demands over and over again. This I did with icy consistency.’

Suddenly Hitler stopped short in front of Himmler and said: ‘Well, Himmler, General Wenck will arrive at your headquarters tonight and will take charge of the attack.’

Guderian had never seen Hitler rave so violently. The grim eyes of Bismarck in Lenbach’s portrait had stared down on the scene, and Guderian sensed the strength of the gaze from the bronze bust of Hindenburg which was standing behind him.

‘The General Staff has won a battle this day’, said Hitler, and suddenly gave one of his most charming smiles.

On the same day Himmler’s headquarters were moved once more, this time to the woods near Prenzlau, seventy miles north of Berlin and some thirty miles west of Stettin and the Russian front on the Oder. But Himmler returned to Hohenlychen, Gebhardt’s nursing home, which was some seventy miles north of Berlin, in a state of nervous collapse, addressing an absurd order of the day to his forces: ‘Forward through mud! Forward through snow! Forward by day! Forward by night! Forward to liberate our German soil!’²⁹ Wenck arrived on 16 February to direct the operations which began that same day, while Himmler summoned Skorzeny to the nursing home, and indulged in day-dreams about the imminent defeat of the Russians. According to Guderian, ‘His appreciation of our enemies was positively childish.’

But the offensive was doomed; Wenck broke his shoulder in a car accident while driving through the night to Berlin on 17 February to report to Hitler. On 20 February Bormann wrote to his wife: ‘Uncle Heinrich’s offensive did not succeed, that is to say it did not develop properly, and now the divisions which he was holding in reserve have to be put in on other sectors. It means constant improvisation from one day to the next.’ According to Guderian the attack, which had begun well enough under Wenck on 16 and 17 February, had lost its momentum by 18 February. The Russians regained their lost ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the German armoured divisions.

For a further month Himmler remained in his nominal command during a period involving heavy losses of territory in most sectors in the north-east and the south; the coastal bases were cut off or evacuated; meanwhile the endless, merciless bombing of Berlin continued every night. By the middle of March, the morale of the S.S. divisions in Hungary had collapsed, and they began to retreat against Hitler’s absolute orders. In his fury, Hitler demanded that the men of these divisions have their S.S. armbands stripped from them; one of the divisions to be so disgraced was the Leibstandarte, which had once formed his bodyguard. Himmler was ordered south to Hungary to supervise the dishonouring of the S.S.

But Himmler had for some weeks lived in a state bordering on collapse. His experiences as a general in the field subject to the raging pressures of Hitler’s fanatical command drove him back in March to his bed in Gebhardt’s nursing home, which became both his retreat and his headquarters. Wherever he went he could not escape the appalling dilemma of the Russian advances and Hitler’s hysterical reproaches. Like Goring, he could not stand the anger of the Fuhrer; he did not have the strength of mind or purpose to oppose him. Like a terrified schoolboy, he retired to bed to escape the wrath of an authority that overwhelmed him. As Guderian saw it: ‘I was in a position on several occasions to observe his lack of selfassurance and courage in Hitler’s presence… His decisions when in command of Army Group Vistula were dictated by fear.’

In consequence of this, Himmler lost the regard of his armies over whom in Hitler’s name he endeavoured to establish a reign of terror. During the last days of German rule in Danzig, the trees of the Hindenburg-Allee became gibbets for the bodies of dead youths displayed with placards hung round their necks proclaiming, ‘I hang here because I left my unit without permission.’

On the main Oder front, immobile again for a brief while during the middle of March, the still massive armies of Hitler had little armour left with which to fight. Men press-ganged for the front had no equipment with which to repel the invader. Yet they were ordered to fight without thought of retreat, and the practice abandoned almost a century before of thrashing soldiers found guilty of cowardice was revived to curb the defeatism in Himmler’s improvised forces, which now included such irregular recruits as foreign conscripts, schoolboys, convicts, exiles from the Baltic, staff from aerodromes abandoned by the Luftwaffe, and old men drafted from the Home Guard.

It was Guderian, according to his own account, who finally managed to displace Himmler from his command, where he had ‘proved a complete failure’. No reports were sent in to Army headquarters, and in mid-March Guderian drove to Prenzlau to find out what was happening. He had the impression that the orders sent to Himmler were no longer carried out. When he arrived, Himmler was not there; Guderian was informed he was at Hohenlychen suffering from influenza.

‘Can’t you rid us of our commander’, begged General Heinz Lammerding, Himmler’s Chief-of-Staff.

This was what Guderian was determined to do. He drove straight to Hohenlychen, where he was surprised to find Himmler ‘apparently in robust health’, apart from a cold in the head. Guderian pointed out to him that he was obviously overworked as Reichsfuhrer S.S., Head of the Reich Police, Minister of the Interior, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army and Commander of the Army Group Vistula. Also, ‘he must have realized by now that a command of troops at the front is no easy matter’. He ought at least to give up his command in the east. Himmler hesitated.

‘I can’t go and say that to the Fuhrer’, he said. ‘He wouldn’t approve of my making such a suggestion.’ Guderian saw his chance. ‘Then will you authorize me to say it for you?’ he demanded.³⁰

Himmler had to agree, and so lost his command on 20 March. According to Guderian, one of the principal reasons he had retained it, apart from ambition for office, was a desire to win for himself a Knight’s Cross.

‘He completely underestimated the qualities that are necessary for a man to be a successful commander of troops. On the very first occasion when he had to undertake a task before the eyes of all the world — one that could not be carried out by means of backstairs intrigues and fishing in troubled waters — the man inevitably proved a failure. It was complete irresponsibility on his part to wish to hold such an appointment; it was equally irresponsible of Hitler to entrust him with it.’

Guderian had by now enjoyed the opportunity closely to observe Himmler’s character. He describes him as ‘the most impenetrable of all Hitler’s disciples’. He seemed ‘an inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority. The impression he made was one of simplicity. He went out of his way to be polite. In contrast to Goring, his private life might be described as positively spartan in its austerity.’ Yet he also seemed ‘like a man from some other planet’. His imagination was ‘vivid, and even fantastic … His attempt to educate the German people in National Socialism resulted only in the concentration camps.’ But Guderian sees fit to add that ‘the way the concentration camp methods were kept secret can only be described as masterly’.

The mask of resolution which Himmler chose to wear for the particular benefit of Hitler and the S.S. was dropped to a varying degree when he was faced by men equally determined to stop the war and save what life could be preserved before the final catastrophe. The concentration camps of the east were gradually falling into enemy hands, and Himmler was deeply disturbed by the conditions which the camps inside Germany would reveal should the Allied armies liberate them. Once the desperate task of stemming the Russian advance was removed