Heinrich Himmler

II. Reichsfuhrer S.S.

Though the appointment of Himmler to the command of the S.S. was for Hitler a matter of expediency, for the man himself it was a moment of fulfilment. He was now Reichsfuhrer S.S. This new, high-sounding title was in itself a challenge to his tenacity and an inspiration to the particular vision germinating in his brain, his own interpretation of what Hitler, with his aid, might make of the German people in the distant future.

Himmler was now twenty-eight, a young man with a pregnant wife older than himself, and a modest smallholding. To be Reichsfuhrer S.S. based on Munich was to be in command of less than 300 men, and there were limits even to this very minor place of power. In Berlin, the centre of radical action stirred up by Goebbels’s violent propaganda, Kurt Daluege was also appointed by Hitler to be head of the local S.S. and empowered to operate independently of Himmler, who was in any case regarded, along with his force, as subordinate not only to Hitler but to the general organization of the S.A., the brownshirt Party battalions on the streets. The S.S. was in fact a force within a force, its special task nominally the protection of Hitler and other Nazi leaders at meetings, rallies and parades. But, according to Gunther d’Alquen, who was later to become editor of Das Schwarze Korps, the special journal of the S.S., Hitler had instructed his Reichsfuhrer S.S. to make the corps into an utterly dependable body of carefully selected men.

Himmler was therefore able to indulge his vision. In spite of his sloping shoulders, his close-cropped hair, his neatly trimmed moustache and rimless pince-nez with its ear-chains suitable for a respectable clerk, he saw his unit of Black Guards as an elite band of warriors whose unique character would elevate them far above the street-ruffians of the S.A. They were to be made into Hitler’s knights-at-arms.

This elevation of his men became Himmler’s great obsession. The fact that he played comparatively little part in the day-by-day strategy and intrigue with which Hitler, Goring and Goebbels worked their way to power between 1929 and 1933 did not at this stage trouble him. He had his own bright, particular star to follow. His immediate ambitions in the Party were fulfilled for a while by his command of the S.S. and by the seat in the Reichstag that was allocated to him after the 1930 elections. His domestic ambitions, such as they might be, were fulfilled when his wife had given birth to their child, Gudrun, in 1929. Marga Himmler was attended by a Dr Brack, whose son, Dr Viktor Brack, was some twelve years later to take charge of Himmler’s euthanasia programme, after first serving him in the capacity of a chauffeur.

The S.S. did not expand suddenly under Himmler’s leadership. The years 1929 and 1930 represent primarily a period of preparation; the final stage of expansion came later, as we shall see, during 1931, when many thousands of men were added to the force. Their initial duties, when the S.S. had been summoned to roll-calls and allocated in groups to accompany various Party speakers to their meetings, were by then superseded; by 1931 the S.S. had other work, at once more secret and more spectacular.

The first substantial stage in the establishment of a permanent, elite corps came when Himmler issued, in January 1932, the notorious marriage code for the members of the S.S. The code was based on the principles outlined by Walter Darre in his book Um Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), which was published under the auspices of the Party in Munich in 1929.

Darre was Hitler’s agricultural expert, and he had come to believe in selective breeding as a result of his studies. He was born in the Argentine in 1895, and had been educated in England at King’s College School, Wimbledon. He had for a while been a civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, but had been dismissed in 1929 after a disagreement with his colleagues. In the same year he published a book on the peasantry as the life source of the Nordic race. His ambition was to become Reich Minister of Agriculture, and this indeed is what he became in 1933.

Darre is of importance only because of the hardening influence he had on certain of Himmler’s prejudices, which were later to develop into dire obsessions. Darre was some five years older than Himmler, and in a movement that found it expedient to encourage unscientific theories if the results arrived at were useful as propaganda, Darre became an accepted ‘thinker’ on behalf of the Nazis, closely linked with Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal propounders of the myth which convinced the Party that the true Germans possessed a unique racial superiority.

Rosenberg was of German stock, but he had been born in the Baltic town of Reval and had studied architecture in Moscow before escaping to Germany at the time of the Russian Revolution. He had become editor of Hitler’s journal Volkischer Beobachter in 1923. In his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, he declared the humane ideals of Christian Europe to be a useless creed. What Europe needed, he said, was to be freed from the soft, abstract Christian principles derived from Asia Minor and the East, and to discover a new philosophy, which would be rooted once more in the entrails of the earth and recognize the racial superiority and cleanliness of Nordic man. ‘A culture always decays’, wrote Rosenberg, ‘when humanitarian ideals… obstruct the right of the dominant race to rule those it has subjugated.’ He saw in the German people the race endowed by nature with a true, mystic understanding, a ‘religion of the blood’. Christianity, on the other hand, taught the decadent doctrine that all races shared an equality of soul, which the German race would soon show to be nothing but a vicious and insidious illusion.

In place of the meek and all-forgiving, Rosenberg created the ideal of the ‘powerful, earth-bound figure’, the ‘strong peasant’, and it was at this point that Darre, Rosenberg’s disciple and Himmler’s teacher, took over the spiritual education of his leader.

In Blood and Soil, Darre gave his reasons why the German race was so especially privileged. His assumptions were based on the essential nobility of the Nordic peasantry, whose blood was as rich and fruitful as the soil they tilled. So great was their virtue that the future strength of Europe depended on the survival of their stock; it was essential they should breed and multiply until their blond and shining youth outnumbered and outfaced the lurking, decadent Slavs and Jews, whose blood was poison to the human race and whose haunts were the healthless streets of towns and cities.¹

Himmler’s energies during this initial period were, as we have said, devoted to the theory and practice of the S.S. In 1931 Darre joined his staff to organize the department known as the Race and Settlement Office, Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (R.U.S.H.A.). This office was set up to determine the racial standards required of good German stock, to conduct research into the surviving ethnic groups in Europe that could be claimed as German, and to decide all matters connected with the descent of individuals at home and abroad about whom there were any racial doubts. Darre remained in charge of this office with its increasing powers until 1938, though he was also, from 1933, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture. It was with his aid that searching tests were devized for the brides of S.S. men and made obligatory in the notorious Marriage Law of the S.S., dated 31 December 1931 and coming into force the following day.

In its opening paragraphs, Himmler’s Marriage Law insisted on the importance of maintaining the high standard of blood in the S.S.² The principal clauses that followed filled many unmarried S.S. men with dismay:

‘Every S.S. man who aims to get married must procure for this purpose the marriage certificate of the Reichsfuhrer S.S.

‘S.S. members who though denied marriage certificates marry in spite of it, will be stricken from the S.S.; they will be given the choice of withdrawing.

‘The working-out of the details of marriage petitions is the task of the Race Office of the S.S.

‘The Race Office of the S.S. directs the Clan Book of the S.S., in which the families of S.S. members will be entered after the marriage certificate is issued.

‘The Reichsfuhrer S.S., the manager of the Race Office, and the specialists of this office are duty bound on their word of honour to secrecy.’

Himmler ended his Marriage Code with a defiant flourish:

‘It is clear to the S.S. that with this command it has taken a step of great significance. Derision, scorn, and failure to understand do not move us; the future belongs to us!