Heinrich Himmler

from his hands by Guderian’s intervention, all that was left for him to do in his semi-retirement was to redeem his own personal situation as best he could. It was now that he came more fully under the influence of the peacemakers — Schellenberg, Kersten and the Swedish Count Bernadotte.

Bernadotte has left his own account of his dealings with Himmler from February to April 1945. He acted as a purely private ambassador on behalf of the International Red Cross. In his book The Fall of the Curtain he pays tribute to the devious Schellenberg, but never once makes reference to Kersten.³¹ Bernadotte was Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross and he had the distinction of being a relative of the King of Sweden. According to his own statement, he was anxious to intervene largely to rescue from the holocaust of Germany several thousand Scandinavian prisoners of war and a group of Scandinavian women who, although German by marriage, had been widowed during the war and wanted desperately to return to their native lands. Bernadotte was led, either through vanity or illusion, to represent himself in the light of a great saviour and peace-maker fearlessly challenging the leaders of Nazi Germany, and more especially Himmler. That he failed altogether to acknowledge the groundwork achieved in earlier and more difficult times by Kersten is a deliberate omission, and throws some suspicion on his assessment of his personal achievements during the last weeks of the regime.

Kersten, as we have seen, had managed to move his family to Stockholm in September 1943, and, once there, had inspired the tentative peace discussions which Schellenberg had undertaken with Abram Stevens Hewitt, Roosevelt’s special representative who was on a visit to Stockholm. He also initiated the first stage of the plan to evacuate Swedes and other Scandinavians who were prisoners of war from German-occupied territory, a plan on which he worked with the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Gunther. Kersten was also working for the release of Dutch, French and Jewish prisoners. Moving constantly between Sweden and Germany, Kersten had worked on Himmler’s conscience with the same assiduous care with which he massaged his body. The initial proposal was that while neutral Swedes might be released, the Norwegian and Danish men and women in the concentration camps should be sent for internment in Sweden.

During the summer of 1944, Kersten had managed to persuade Himmler to consider placing the Scandinavian prisoners in camps where they would be free from the worst bombing and could receive help from the Swedish Red Cross. He also joined with Madame Immfeld to urge the release of 20,000 Jews for internment by the Swiss. In December, when Kersten was attending Himmler on his train in the Black Forest, the Reichsfuhrer had gone further and agreed to release 1,000 Dutch women, together with Norwegian and Danish women and children and certain male prisoners, provided Sweden would organize the transport. He also agreed to transfer to Switzerland 800 French women, 400 Belgians, 500 Polish women and between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews. Before his return to Stockholm on 22 December, Kersten had written a letter confirming the arrangement and explaining that he had discussed the details with Kaltenbrunner in Berlin. He had also implored Himmler to release the Jewish prisoners to the Swiss.

As we have seen, Himmler had begun to transfer some groups of Jews to Switzerland when further evacuations were stopped by Hitler’s orders on 6 February. Before this, Himmler had even been negotiating with the Swiss for placing the concentration camps under International Red Cross inspection; Red Cross officials had visited Oranienburg on 2 February. But Hitler’s anger was always too much for Himmler; he collapsed like a spent balloon. After the fright he had received on 6 February, he retreated to Hohenlychen as the most peaceful place from which to conduct the military campaign in the east, which at that time was still nominally in his hands.

At Hohenlychen he received a number of important guests. On 14 February, the day after Himmler’s humiliation by Guderian in front of the Fuhrer in Berlin, Goebbels arrived in Hohenlychen, having driven through the columns of German refugees from the east in order to visit the Reichsfuhrer who, he gathered, was ill with tonsillitis. Semmler, Goebbels’s aide records Goebbels’s private remarks during this period about the man who seemed nearest to him now among the Nazi leaders.

‘Goebbels obviously disliked Himmler, although in their work they get along together… But Himmler’s extreme radical point of view and his use of brutal methods to get his own way make him attractive to Goebbels. Sometimes he thinks of the head of the S.S. as a rival… Goebbels would have liked the job of Minister of the Interior… But Himmler got in first, and since then he has felt prickings of jealousy… Except Hitler, no one is entirely without a secret fear of Himmler. Goebbels considers that Himmler has built up the greatest power organization that one can imagine.’³²

The following day it was Ribbentrop who made contact with Himmler, and probably came to see him at Hohenlychen; Himmler apparently gave his approval to Ribbentrop’s plan to send Fritz Hesse to Stockholm on a fruitless peace mission. Hesse left on 17 February, the day after Bernadotte arrived on his mission to Germany.

Bernadotte’s principal intention was to visit Himmler and take over the various negotiations initiated by Kersten, whom he appears to have regarded as an interloper. On 18 February³³ Bernadotte had his first meeting with Himmler at Hohenlychen after he had formally visited both Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop, whose lengthy speeches during the interview he secretly timed with a stop-watch. Ribbentrop’s foreign policy, he observed, seemed to favour some kind of agreement with Stalin for the joint domination of Europe by the U.S.S.R. and Germany — the reverse, that is, of the policy Schellenberg and Kersten were advocating to Himmler, which aimed at linking Germany and the Western Allies in combined opposition to further encroachments by the Red Army into Western Europe. Accompanied by Schellenberg, Bernadotte drove to Hohenlychen, which he discovered to be filled with German refugees from the east. Contrary to what he had expected, he found Himmler in a lively mood. He was dressed in the green uniform of the Waffen S.S. and wore hornrimmed spectacles instead of the pince-nez which Bernadotte had seen in so many portraits of the Reichsfuhrer. Bernadotte’s description of Himmler is of particular interest:

‘He had small, well-shaped and delicate hands, and they were carefully manicured, although this was forbidden in the S.S. He was also, to my great surprise, extremely affable. He gave evidence of a sense of humour, tending rather to the macabre… Certainly there was nothing diabolical in his appearance. Nor did I observe any sign of that icy hardness in his expression of which I had heard so much. Himmler… seemed a very vivacious personality, inclined to sentimentality where his relations with the Fuhrer were concerned, and with a great capacity for enthusiasm.’

When Bernadotte, who was aware of Himmler’s interest in the Scandinavian countries, gave him a seventeenth-century Swedish book on Scandinavian runic inscriptions, he ‘seemed noticeably affected’.

Bernadotte’s specific request was for the release of some thousands of Norwegian and Danish prisoners for internment in Sweden; this Himmler refused, but agreed they should be moved to two specific camps, where they might be cared for by the Swedish Red Cross. He even agreed, after a discursive conversation about the dangers to Europe of a Russian victory, that ‘if the necessity should arise, he would allow interned Jews to be handed over to the Allied military authorities’. When they parted, he asked Schellenberg for an assurance that a good driver had been obtained to take Bernadotte back to Berlin. ‘Otherwise’, he added, ‘it might happen that the Swedish papers would announce in big headlines: War Criminal Himmler murders Count Bernadotte.’

According to Schellenberg, Himmler was annoyed by this intrusion into the negotiations which he wanted to keep as secret as possible. The fact that Bernadotte’s visit was known officially to Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner meant that Hitler also would know of it; however, he decided to put the whole matter on an official basis and instructed both Kaltenbrunner and Fegelein, his official representative at Hitler’s headquarters, to sound Hitler on the matter. Fegelein reported Hitler as saying: ‘You can’t get anywhere with this sort of nonsense in total war.’ Schellenberg, anxious as ever to put himself in the picture, claims to have advised Bernadotte on the journey out to Hohenlychen to compromise about the Danish and Norwegian prisoners and ask for their removal to a central camp in the north-west by Swedish Red Cross transport rather than their extradition to Sweden for internment. After the interview, he claims that Himmler ‘had been very favourably impressed’ by the Count, and wanted to maintain close contact with him. No doubt he was encouraged to seize this new lifeline to the future by the failure of the attack on the Russians which had just been carried out in his name by Guderian’s nominees.

A week later, Himmler ventured as far as Berlin to attend a reception given by Goebbels at his Ministry. They talked about peace negotiations, but Goebbels had renewed his faith in Hitler and refused to think of such things