Heinrich Himmler

Degrelle was determined to make a bold finish to his fighting career in the eyes of Himmler, who no longer wanted to see him, though he was quite prepared to add his men to the diminishing forces at his command. He sent word to Degrelle to join him at Malente, near Kiel, and on the way the Belgian commander in his Volkswagen powered by potato schnapps caught up with the Reichsfuhrer S.S. driving at the head of his column of Mercedes and lorries. Himmler, wearing a crash-helmet, was driving his own car, and they broke the journey at Malente. By now Degrelle had little to offer his leader; the Belgian S.S. units had scattered to Denmark. Himmler’s sole concern was to keep up with Doenitz, and Degrelle followed the fleet of cars and lorries on the journey north to Flensburg.

As they were approaching Kiel, a daylight raid began. Himmler kept calm and shouted, ‘Discipline, gentlemen, discipline’, as his staff, both men and women, dived for safety in the mud, in which the girls had the shoes sucked from their feet. Degrelle left the scene as the officers and their aides struggled back with their vehicles after the raiding planes had gone. He went directly north through Kiel while Himmler’s convoy retreated in search of some less hazardous route to Flensburg.

That night Himmler was joined on his journey by Werner Best from Denmark.¹⁴ They sat together in the Mercedes which Himmler still drove, and they spent the tedious hours of travel in talk. They were frequently held up by air-raids and did not reach Flensburg until early in the morning of 3 May.

Himmler, as always, was careful what he said. Hitler had not been quite himself, he admitted, during the past six months, and Bormann had increased his hold over him. He had issued Himmler with impossible commands on the Russian front and had refused even to discuss the idea of peace. On the other hand, Himmler said he was certain that if he had been allowed to have only half-anhour’s conference with Eisenhower he could have convinced him of the necessity of joining forces with the Germans to drive back the Russian invaders. Before they parted in the morning, Best said he was going back across the Danish border before his appointment with Doenitz later that day.

‘But what are you going to do yourself, Reichsfuhrer?’ asked Best.

‘I don’t yet know’, was all Himmler could find to say, but he asked Best to take the S.S. women staff with him over the nearby border into Denmark, where they would be able to wash and get themselves food before returning to their duties.

Himmler’s indecision was shown even more in a conversation he had with Schwerin-Krosigk, who had become Foreign Minister in the place of Ribbentrop and therefore retired to Flensburg.¹⁵ He discovered Himmler in a mood of despair, an unwanted adviser at the headquarters of the new Fuhrer.

‘Graf Schwerin, what ever is to become of me?’ he asked.

Schwerin-Krosigk did not know what was to become of anyone; Germany scarcely had need of a Foreign Minister. It seemed to him that to help organize the evacuation of Germans from the east was the only practical thing they could do for the moment. But he tried to give a serious answer to Himmler’s question.

‘As I see it, there are three courses open to you’, he said. ‘The first is to shave off your moustache, disguise yourself in a wig and dark glasses, and try to disappear altogether. I expect, even so, you would soon be discovered, and your end would scarcely be glorious. The second course is to shoot yourself, though as a Christian I can’t advise you to do this; you would have to decide such a thing for yourself. What I really recommend is the third course: drive straight to Montgomery’s headquarters and say, ‘I am Heinrich Himmler, I want to take full responsibility for everything the S.S. has done.” As to what will happen then, who can say? But if it proves the end for you, it will at least be the most honourable way out.’

Himmler decided to act as a kind of elder statesman in Doenitz’s cabinet at Ploen for as long as he could. He was plainly unable to accept the fact that he no longer held the offices to which he had been formerly attached. His immediate retinue still amounted to some 150 staff officers and assistants. But neither Doenitz nor Himmler knew the full terms of Himmler’s rejection by Hitler. The messenger from the Bunker had failed in his mission of bringing the Fuhrer’s testament to his successor, and Bormann, as everyone then believed, had been killed while trying to escape from the Bunker on the night of 30 April. Had they been able to read the carefully typed terms of Hitler’s denunciation they would at least have known what the Fuhrer had felt about his former Minister: ‘Goering and Himmler, by their secret negotiations with the enemy, without my knowledge or approval, and by their illegal attempts to seize power in the State, quite apart from their treachery to my person, have brought irreparable shame on the country and the whole people.’ All they knew in fact was what Greim, the wounded leader of the Luftwaffe, and his devoted pilot, Hanna Reitsch, may have told them of Hitler’s paroxysms of anger, and what Goebbels’s signal indicated about the distribution of the principal offices of state, which neither Bormann nor Goebbels had arrived to take up. Doenitz, concerned only to rid himself of the past and surrender in a manner becoming an Admiral of the Fleet, was most unwilling to have a man of Himmler’s reputation serving in any cabinet of his own making. Yet he dared not in the circumstances entirely disregard him, so he put up with his presence at the council table without confirming him in any office.

When on 4 May Montgomery’s terms for unconditional surrender were discussed, Himmler’s views were aired along with those of Doenitz’s other advisers. He felt that the troops in Norway should be surrendered to Sweden to save them from captivity in Russia, and that some concessions might be gained if an offer were made to surrender peaceably the many places outside Germany still held by German troops. Schellenberg, resolutely travelling between Sweden, Denmark and Germany in his efforts to obtain agreement to a peaceful resolution of the German occupation of the Scandinavian countries, turned not to Himmler but to Doenitz and Schwerin-Krosigk when he at length arrived at five o’clock that afternoon after a fearful journey from Copenhagen. The following day, 5 May, he left again for Denmark, saying goodbye to Himmler, in whom he was by now no longer interested.

On 5 May Himmler gathered his own leaders and advisers around him, including S.S. Obergruppenfuhrer Ohlendorff of the Security Office, S.S. Obergruppenfuhrer von Weyrsch of the Secret Police and S.S. Obergruppenfuhrer von Herff, a general of the Waffen S.S.; Brandt was also there, as was Gebhardt, who had left his patients at Hohenlychen in the care of the Russians. To them and their colleagues he solemnly recited policies so utterly out of keeping with the situation they can scarcely be credited; only a prolonged blindness to reality through shock can account for them. He, for one, was not going to give up and commit suicide. He would, he said, establish his own S.S. government in Schleswig-Holstein in order to conduct independent peace negotiations with the Western Powers. He then began to distribute new titles to his followers as his partners in founding an entirely new Nazi regime.

Himmler’s rejection by Hitler, however, was followed on 6 May by his rejection at the hands of Doenitz, who personally gave Himmler his formal dismissal in writing:

‘Dear Herr Reich Minister,

In view of the present situation, I have decided to dispense with your further assistance as Reich Minister of the Interior and member of the Reich Government, as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, and as chief of the Police. I now regard all your offices as abolished. I thank you for the service which you have given to the Reich.’

Along with Himmler, Doenitz dismissed Goebbels, who was dead, and other Nazi ministers who still remained like ghosts from an horrific and evil past.¹⁶ He also forbade the continuation of resistance by diehard Nazis of the S.S.

But Himmler would not leave. After 6 May he haunted Flensburg along with his staff, his guards and his equipment, a monstrous survivor without a domain. He told Schwerin-Krosigk he would carefully consider his advice, but he still had obstinate dreams of maintaining his individual power. He went to the Nazi Commander of the German forces in Schleswig and Denmark, Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, in the vain hope of finding in him an ally. But Busch only wanted to get the arrangements for his own surrender concluded. So Himmler returned to the headquarters he had set up in Flensburg from which, one by one, his retinue were melting away.

On 8 May he reduced his fleet of cars to four and made a first gesture of self-abrogation by shaving off his moustache. He wondered where he could go in order to escape unwelcome attention. While Ohlendorff advised him to surrender and answer the world’s outcry against himself and the S.S., he considered, naturally without reaching any firm decision, whether he should take refuge with his friend the Prince of Waldeck, an autocratic general who had charge of the S.S. establishment on his estate at Arolsen.¹⁷

At length, on 10 May, Himmler and his remaining entourage left Flensburg and set out for Marne at the Dicksander Koog on the east coast of Schleswig-Holstein.¹⁸ It took them two days to get there, and