Heinrich Himmler

See The Final Solution, p. 462. Becher’s affidavit was produced during the hearing of Case XI at Nuremberg, Doc. No. N.G. 2675.

10

Eichmann refused to obey orders received from Himmler by telephone to stop the deportations; he claimed he must have them in wirting. See The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, p. 170.

11

See I.M.T. XI, p. 306.

12

See The S.S., p. 385.

13

Quoted by Milton Shulman in Defeat in the West, p. 218.

14

See Domberger, V.2, pp. 187-201.

15

See Guderian, Panzer Leader, p. 355.

16

For the dispute surrounding this episode, see The S.S., p. 377.

17

For Vlassov and the significance of Himmler’s refusal to make use of him, see above, Chapter V, note 22.

18

Werwolf, the so-called German resistance movement against the Allies, was largely a propaganda device prepared by Goebbels and Himmler.

19

See The S.S., p. 381.

20

According to von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende (Vol. II, p. 161) Goebbels proposed to Hitler that Himmler should be made officially Minister of War.

21

For quotations, see The Bormann Letters.

22

Fegelein and Burgdorff, these men with whom Bormann seems so friendly, have their modest place in history. Fegelein, Himmler’s uncertain representative at Hitler’s headquarters, was married to Eva Braun’s sister, but nevertheless was executed by Hitler for desertion during the last days of the war. Burgdorff’s claims to distinction include the sinister fact that it was he who handed Rommel the poison with which he was required to kill himself.

23

See Westphal, The German Army in the West, p. 172.

24

Westphal, op. cit., p. 188.

25

Guderian, op. cit., p. 403.

26

An interesting picture of Himmler as commander-in-the-field is given by the well-known German journalist, Jurgen Thorwald, in his two books, one on the Vistula campaign, Es begann an der Weichsel, and the other on the Elbe campaign, Das Ende an der Elbe.

27

man synthetic oil industry had suffered severely from Allied bombing. Hitler believed that at all costs he must preserve the Austrian and Hungarian oil wells which were still in his hands.

28

Guderian, op. cit., p. 413.

29

See The S.S., p. 406.

30

See Guderian, op. cit., p. 422.

31

Count Bernadotte, in The Fall of the Curtain, a book largely ghost-written by Schellenberg who took refuge with him after the collapse of Germany, deleted all Schellenberg’s references to Kersten. Nor are there any references to the work of the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Gunther, who had planned the negotiations which Kersten so resolutely carried through with Himmler. See the attack on Bernadotte’s attitude to Kersten made by Trevor-Roper in his Introduction to The Kersten Memoirs. Dr de Jong, director of the Rijksinstituut in Amsterdam and a distinguished historian, who knew Kersten personally, assures us that while Kersten undoubtedly did good, he was a man of great vanity who tended to exaggerate his influence, an example being his claim that he practically saved the entire Dutch nation from evacuation to the East. Kersten and Bernadotte were unable to tolerate each other.

32

See Semmler, Goebbels, the Man next to Hitler, pp. 178-9.

33

In The Fall of the Curtain, the date of the final meeting with Himmler is given on p. 41 as 12 February. This is plainly an oversight, since on page 20 Bernadotte states he flew to Berlin on 16 February. Schellenberg states (p. 435) that he took Bernadotte to see Himmler two days after the meeting with Kaltenbrunner. In The Last Days of Hitler, Prof. Trevor-Roper wrongly accepts 12 February as the date of the meeting, and Reitlinger variously gives it as 17 February in The Final Solution, p. 462 and 18 February in The S.S., p. 415.

34

See The S.S., p. 414. The source is von Oven, op. cit. II, pp. 252-4.

35

See Prof Trevor-Roper’s Introduction to Kersten Memoirs, pp. 15-16, and The S.S., p. 416.

36

See Thorwald, Das Ende an der Elbe, p. 25, and The S.S., p. 413.

37

See I.M.T. XIV, p. 374, and The Final Solution, p. 446.

38

Quoted by Shulman, Defeat in the West, p. 280.

39

During the course of this talk, Count Schwerin-Krosigk said that he felt the only justification for the sacrifices which Hitler had imposed on the German people would be to break the alliance between the Western Allies and the Russians. Himmler agreed and, according to Schwerin-Krosigk, openly admitted that great mistakes had been made. As for the Jews, they had now become very important as ‘barter in all future negotiations’. Himmler was not prepared to say anything disloyal about Hitler; he merely said that ‘the Fuhrer had a different conception’. Speaking of himself, Himmler added that ‘while his reputation was that of a gay and godless person, in the depths of his heart he was really a believer in Providence and in God’. It was God who had spared the Fuhrer on 20 July last; it was God who had brought a thaw to the frozen waters of the Oder and delayed the Russian crossing at the moment when he had been in despair about the collapse of their defence; it was God who had taken Roosevelt’s life at the very moment when the Russians were closing in on Berlin. (See Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 197 et seq.)

Additional Note