without the active support of Hitler himself. He even suggested that if such action were ever taken by the Fuhrer, he would much prefer to look to Stalin in the east than the Allies in the west. ‘Madness,’ murmured Himmler, and walked away.34 Goebbels was preparing for his role as the stonewall defender of Berlin, the man who with his wife and children was to lay down his life for the Fuhrer.
Kersten returned to Germany from Stockholm on 3 March after further consultations with Gunther, the Swedish Foreign Minister, who feared that the Allies would force Sweden to break her neutrality and enter the war if Germany did not withdraw from Norway. He had also met Hilel Storch in Stockholm on 25 February. Storch was one of the leading men in the World Jewish Congress in New York, and he was anxious to use every possible means to secure the safety and the release of the remaining Jews imprisoned in Germany. He knew of Hitler’s orders, that both the prisoners and the camps should be destroyed rather than let them be liberated by the Allies. Kersten undertook to negotiate directly with Himmler for the relief of the Jews by the International Red Cross.
He began his new talks with Himmler on 5 March. ‘He was in a highly nervous condition,’ writes Kersten, ‘negotiations were difficult and stormy.’
During the following days Kersten fought to rouse Himmler’s conscience and the remnants of his humanity. Schellenberg did the same: ‘I wrestled for his soul’, he said. ‘I begged him to avail himself of the good offices of Sweden… I suggested that he should ask Count Bernadotte to fly to General Eisenhower and transmit to him his offer of capitulation.’ According to Schellenberg, Himmler gave in and agreed that Schellenberg should continue his sessions with Bernadotte, whom he was unwilling at this stage to meet himself because of his fear of Hitler and of the leadership group in Berlin, who he knew were hostile and had by now an easier access to the Fuhrer than he had himself.
On the same day that Kersten began his desperate discussions with Himmler, Bernadotte arrived from Sweden to make final arrangements for the transportation of the Danish and Norwegian prisoners from camps all over Germany to a central camp at Neuenburg. These negotiations were conducted with Kaltenbrunner and Schellenberg. Difficulties developed on both sides. Bernadotte claims he had overcome Kaltenbrunner’s point blank refusal to co-operate. On the other hand, according to Professor Trevor-Roper, Bernadotte himself refused point- blank to accept non-Scandinavian prisoners on the Swedish transport, and wrote to Himmler accordingly.35 The matter had to be straightened out by Gunther and Kersten, and the transportation took place during the last two weeks of March. Meanwhile, Kersten negotiated a further agreement with Himmler of the greatest importance, again working together with Gunther. This agreement was signed by Himmler on 12 March, and in it the Reichsfuhrer S.S. undertook to disregard Hitler’s orders that concentration camps were to be blown up before the arrival of Allied forces. He agreed to surrender them intact with their prisoners still alive, and to stop all further execution of Jews.
In making this decision, Himmler was no doubt influenced by his discovery on 10 March that a typhus epidemic had broken out in the huge camp at Belsen. The news had been kept from him by Kaltenbrunner, according to Kersten, who at once made use of this new threat to Germany to increase his pressure on Himmler. ‘I pointed out that he could not in any circumstances permit this camp to become a plague centre which would imperil all Germany.’ He sent orders at once to Kaltenbrunner in which, guided by Kersten, he demanded that drastic measures be taken to stamp out the epidemic. On 19 March Himmler sent further written orders to Kramer, the commandant of Belsen, saying that ‘not another Jew’ was to be killed and the death rate at the camp, which by now had some 60,000 prisoners, must be reduced at all costs. The state of Belsen was so appalling that even Hoess when he visited the camp was shocked at the sight of so many thousands of dead.
Kersten, who was to leave Germany for Stockholm on 22 March, had now worked Himmler into a pliant mood. In his very full diary for this period, written mainly at Hartzwalde, his old residence near Berlin, Kersten claims that he had managed to persuade Himmler to agree that there should be no fighting in Scandinavia, and also to countermand Hitler’s order that The Hague and other Dutch cities were to be blown up by means of V-2 rockets on the approach of the Allied armies, together with the Zuyder Zee dam. On 14 March Himmler had almost reluctantly signed the order that the cities and the dam were to be spared.
‘Once we had good intentions towards Holland’, said Himmler. ‘For us Germanic peoples are not enemies to be destroyed… The Dutch have learnt nothing from history… They could have helped us and we could have helped them. They have done everything to undermine our victory over Bolshevism.’
Himmler also finally agreed on 17 March, the day before Guderian arrived at Hohenlychen and persuaded him to resign his army command, that he would meet in the strictest secrecy a representative of the World Jewish Congress at Hartzwalde. Kersten suggested that Storch should come to Germany, provided Himmler would guarantee his personal safety.
‘Nothing will happen to Herr Storch’, said Himmler. ‘I pledge my honour and my life on that.’
Kersten, as before, was careful to write Himmler a letter confirming everything that the Reichsfuhrer S.S. had promised to do. Himmler, in his turn, sent an invitation to Storch in which he tried to make out that he had always from the start wanted to draft a helpful and humane approach to the Jewish problem, and had in fact shown his good intentions in recent weeks. He also confirmed his agreements with Kersten in writing, through his secretary Brandt.
On 22 March, the day Kersten flew back to Stockholm to report his various successes to Gunther, Himmler received his successor on the battlefront, General Gotthard Heinrici, at Prenzlau, his military headquarters. He had thought fit the previous day to venture seeing Hitler in Berlin, and Guderian saw him walking with the Fuhrer among the rubble in the Chancellery garden. Afterwards Guderian had told him that in his view the war was lost and the wasteful slaughter of men should be stopped at once.
‘Go with me to Hitler and urge him to arrange an armistice’, Guderian demanded.
This was too much for Himmler.
‘My dear Colonel-General’, said Himmler very precisely. ‘It is still too early for that.’ Guderian was disgusted. He could get no further with Himmler, however much he argued. ‘There was nothing to be done with the man’, he says in his memoirs. ‘He was afraid of Hitler.’
On 22 March Himmler’s last act as a soldier was to assemble both his chiefs of staff and his stenographers at Prenzlau and dictate in the presence of Heinrici his summary of what had happened during the period of his command. As he went on talking, this grandiloquent scene of farewell became increasingly absurd. Heinrici’s professional opinion was that ‘in four months Himmler had failed to grasp the basic elements of generalship’. After two hours’ dictation he became so incoherent that the stenographers could no longer make sense of what he had said and, together with the staff officers, they excused themselves from further work. Heinrici, impatient to get to the front, was finally released from this ordeal by the telephone: General Busse, one of the commanders in the field, was in grave difficulties and wanted to report to his Commander-in-Chief. Himmler straightaway handed the receiver to Heinrici.
‘You are in command now’, he said. ‘You give him the necessary orders.’36
Before the meeting broke up, Heinrici, like Guderian, tried to sound Himmler on the possibilities of initiating peace negotiations with the Western Allies. Himmler tried to sound inconclusive, but admitted cautiously that he had caused certain steps to be taken.
In the chaos of the last month of the war, many men were salving their consciences by attempting to conduct negotiations with the Allies which might, once the war was over, present them in a more favourable light. Among these was General Wolff, who had been Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters until 1943, when he was appointed Military Governor in Northern Italy. Early in March he went to Switzerland and attempted through Allen Dulles to negotiate the surrender of German forces in Italy. However, he failed to meet the emissaries sent by General Alexander to Zurich to discuss terms with him because he dared not admit to Himmler the full nature of his self-appointed mission. He pretended that his sole interest in holding these meetings lay in the exchange of prisoners, a matter which Himmler declared was the concern of Kaltenbrunner. For the moment there was stalemate, but Wolff was only waiting his chance to challenge Kaltenbrunner’s growing authority and act again on his own behalf.
It is often difficult to make any sense of the rival negotiations that were taking place behind Hitler’s back from motives which were a mixture of desperation and self-interest. According to the evidence given at the Nuremberg Trial by Baldur von Schirach, who was the Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna during the war, Himmler came to Vienna at the end of March to organize the evacuation of Jews from Vienna to the camps at Linz and Mauthausen.
‘I want the Jews now employed in industry’, Schirach reported him to have said, ‘to be taken by boat or by
