Heinrich Himmler

unpleasant man.

4

Frau Heydrich has denied to H.F. that she ever had intimate relations with Schellenberg. Nor does Schellenberg himself claim as much. No doubt it was one of Heydrich’s sadistic exercises to try to make it seem that his wife was unfaithful and his subordinate guilty. Though at the start of his career, Schellenberg may have been associated with interrogations involving torture, he managed after the war to dissociate himself completely from the worst excesses of the S.S. and Gestapo. Nevertheless, when he was sentenced in 1949 to six years’ imprisonment dating from 1945, he was regarded by his judges as involved in the execution without trial of a group of Russian prisoners. He was released in 1951 because of his ill-health, and died of a kidney disease in Turin in 1952. He began to write his lengthy memoirs while in hiding in Sweden after the war, and resumed them again as soon as he was released. His wife negotiated their posthumous publication in England in 1956, and H.F. read the original typescript which ran to some 3,000 pages. The memoirs as published have had much inessential and repetitive material deleted.

5

Not to be confused with R.U.S.H.A., the original S.S. marriage office, which was later also concerned with kidnapping children of Nordic blood for German upbringing.

6

For the origin of the Einsatzgruppen in Heydrich’s S.D. offices as early as 1938, see Crankshaw’s Gestapo, pp. 146-52, Reitlinger’s S.S., p. 126 et seq,. and Shirer, op. cit., pp. 958-64.

7

Himmler was frequently forced to discipline the greed for land of these new German settlers, uprooted from their homes and anxious to win the most they could out of their new circumstances.

8

See Cohen, op. cit. pp. 106-8. The figure of 60,000 was Brack’s own estimate for Germany. The Czechoslovak War Crimes Commission estimated some 275,000 mental patients and old people exterminated. For the details of procedure in Germany, see The Death Doctors, p. 236 et seq.

9

See Shirer’s Berlin Diary, pp. 569 et seq.

10

See The Death Doctors, p. 265.

11

Himmler’s famous edict exhorting S.S. men to procreate before leaving for the front was issued in printed form on 28 October 1939. ‘Let us never forget that victory by our swords and the blood shed by our soldiers make no sense at all unless they are succeeded by the victory of our children and the occupation of new earth’, said Himmler. Throughout the war, Himmler was deeply concerned about the sex relations of his S.S. men. Documents held at the Federal Archive at Koblenz show that in 1942 he would only permit sexual relations between S.S. men and Polish women provided the women were officially assigned to a brothel and that there was no question of procreation or emotional entanglement. This is stated in a secret order signed by Himmler and dated 30 June 1942. On 7 March the following year, he signed a further top secret order given by the Fuhrer himself that any S.S. man caught in homosexual activities with another S.S. man would be liable to the death penalty. On the other hand, an increase in the number of illegitimate children of the right stock was favoured; there could not be too many of them. But orphaned children of racially undesirable parents were, by an order signed by Himmler on 1 June 1943, to be taught ‘obedience, diligence and unconditional submission to their German masters’, and given only sufficient low- grade education to make them useful as unskilled labour. Himmler also developed very early on a horror of venereal disease developing among his men, primarily because it might bring on impotence. Everything was done to encourage men with the disease to submit themselves for early treatment.

12

Himmler did not consider designs for his own Reichsfuhrer S.S. seal until the beginning of 1944, when drawings were submitted to him for both a large and a small seal combining the Reich eagle, the S.S. death’s head, oakleaves and gothic lettering. See above Chapter III, Note 11.

13

The files concerning Lebensborn held at Arolsen, now the centre of the International Red Cross Tracing Service for Lost Persons, show that these homes were a constant source of trouble, gossip and scandal, The women, for example, complained officially that their excess milk was siphoned off and that this might spoil the shape of their breasts and make them less desirable. There was trouble over the chocolate allocations, about the medical care, about the way the women were addressed (Frau was the rule), about artificial insemination, about gratuities for especially prolific mothers, and endless fuss about illicit relations and racial impurity. (Compare Chapter III, Note 18). Underlying everything was Himmler’s sentimental attachment to blond children. On one occasion he excused a man who had blocked his way on the road because his car was full of beautiful, fair-haired progeny.

14

In order to regularize as far as possible his fatherhood of Hedwig’s children, Himmler in a legal document dated 12 September 1944 acknowledged himself their father and became co-guardian with Hedwig of the boy Helge, then aged two, and the baby girl, Nanette Dorothea. Nanette’s birth certificate, dated 20 July, names Himmler as the father, and adds that he had already appeared before an S.S. judge on 25 June to claim official recognition of his paternity.

15

Schellenberg is exaggerating when he claims that Himmler actually lived with Hedwig. Rather, he set her and her children up in their own establishment and visited them just as he continued to visit his wife and daughter in Gmund. Nor need he have gone short of money with which to maintain these households. It was only his own meticulous honesty in matters of finance that prevented him from using expense-accounts, let alone accumulating ill-gotten wealth like the other Nazi leaders. He lived strictly within his official income.

16

For the text of this speech at Metz, see N.C.A. IV, pp. 553-8.

17

Many of these were used in evidence during the Doctors’ Trial, and are quoted in The Death Doctors, from which our own quotations are derived.

18

See Ribbentrop Memoirs, pp. 81-2.

19

See I.M.T. VI, p. 179.

20

N.C.A. V, p. 341.

21

See I.M.T. IV, pp, 29 and 36. For Wolff, compare Frischauer op. cit. p. 149.

22

See below Chap. V, p. 150, and Chap. VI, p. 184.

23

See The Final Solution, pp. 21-2, 76-9, and the Dutch edition of Kersten’s Memoirs, Klerk en Beul (1947), pp. 197-8.

24

See Manvell and Fraenkel, Goring, p. 244.

25

See Russell, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, p. 205.

26

I.M.T. III, p. 278.

27

See Hoess’s Memoirs, written in captivity after the war.