Himmler’s Marriage Code for members of the S.S. required every man who wanted to marry to obtain a certificate of approval for his bride in order that the purity of the Nordic stock which he already represented should be maintained unimpaired in the blood of his descendants.
The Office kept stud records for every S.S. man, who was issued with a genealogical or clan book
Later Himmler was to set up a number of S.S. Bride Schools at which, in addition to their political education, the future wives of S.S. men were taught housewifery, the hygiene of childbirth and the principles of rearing their future children in the correct Nazi tradition.
The order, as inhuman as it was outrageous, lay at the heart of Himmler’s future racial policy, and what seemed at first to be merely an absurdity to some of Himmler’s own colleagues was later to become the poisonous root from which sprang the practice of compulsory euthanasia and the genocide of those he regarded as racially impure.
The significance of the S.S. Marriage Code must be understood in its proper light. It could be claimed that, in introducing eugenics and selective breeding among the restricted group of men in his charge, Himmler was anticipating a principle which civilized societies will be led to adopt in the future. He would most certainly have argued himself that this was so. But if such principles are eventually to be adopted, there must surely be every medical, psychological and social safeguard to ensure that the men and women who are bred represent in one way or another the widest capabilities and qualities latent in the human race. It is not necessarily to Himmler’s discredit that he was ambitious to see the human race improved; but it was pernicious that he believed himself fit, together with a few unqualified and unscrupulous colleagues, to determine what the ideal human being should be. He had absorbed a few ill-founded theories and with the temerity of ignorance hastened to put them into immediate practice without taking any account of the cost in human suffering. Thus the men who had through various motives, either worthy and unworthy, joined the S.S. found themselves caught in a ludicrous trap, and had either to submit to Himmler’s oppressive decrees or find methods of evasion which soon became common practice not only in the S.S. but in the whole of Nazi society as the oppression spread.
Himmler’s ideal man was a fair-haired, blue-eyed, superhuman athlete whose values were derived from a medieval concept of relationship with the cultivation of the earth, a man who despised most developments in modern culture because he had no judgment in such matters, though like Heydrich, he might well play accepted music on the violin or read accepted books. He was a man who left all political and social judgment to his leaders, and gave them his unquestioning obedience. Though he might well be in private a kindly husband and an indulgent father, he was essentially a destructive man, ready to act on the vilest or most stupid orders that only served to show the prejudice and cruelty of his commanders. This image of the ideal man, primitive in his outlook and brutal in his behaviour, was the result of the racial intolerance of Rosenberg, Darre and Himmler, whose collective vision was blinded by the same false idea of past glories which bore no relation whatever to historic truth, to the needs of modern society, or to any future social order which might be called civilized.
It was in June of the year when Darre and Himmler were concocting their marriage code that a man arrived to help them who had all the appearance of a young Messiah. Himmler was approached by one of his staff, the Freiherr von Eberstein, with a request that he interview a young man who had recently joined the S.S. in Hamburg. His name was Reinhard Heydrich; he was of good family and had until recently been a lieutenant in the Navy. Heydrich was a godson of Eberstein’s mother. Himmler agreed, then fell ill and cancelled the appointment. Heydrich took no notice of the cancellation and travelled overnight south to Munich, relying on Eberstein to arrange for him to see Himmler, who had returned to his poultry farm to recover from his sickness. Himmler agreed over the telephone that, since Heydrich had come to Munich, he should visit him in Waldtrudering.
The first meeting between these two men, whose strange relationship was to constitute the direst threat to the well-being of Europe that resulted from conquest by Hitler, took place on 4 June 1931. Himmler understood that Heydrich had been a naval Intelligence officer, and he had a particular, important task in mind which he felt might be carried out by a man with this kind of background and training. He wanted to establish an Intelligence or security service of his own within the S.S. to conduct secret research into those members of the Party, particularly among the leaders of the S.A., whose ambitions seemed hostile to his own, or whose presence degraded the ideals of the Party as he conceived them.
The young man who came down to Waldtrudering was of impressive appearance. He was tall and blond, blue-eyed and Nordic, with a model physique that corresponded exactly to Himmler’s conception of what an S.S. man should be. His eyes, in fact, were of a peculiar lightness, piercing and hypnotic. Although there was some mistake in his records (he had been a code and signals officer in naval Intelligence, not an Intelligence officer), his handsome bearing and assurance of manner made an immediate impression on Himmler, whose diffidence of nature always made him nervous when he had to deal with men of a capacity greater than his own. In order to assert himself, Himmler set Heydrich a written test, like a schoolmaster sizing up an over-bright pupil; first he described to him the kind of Intelligence service he had in mind, and then invited Heydrich to outline on paper how he would set about organizing it. He gave him twenty minutes to complete the project, and Heydrich seized this chance to impress still further a man whose limitation of character he could already sense. Himmler read the paper and offered him a post on his personal staff as head of an entirely new department in the S.S., the
During the next ten years Heydrich was to create a network of power which was eventually to threaten not only his master but every other member of the Nazi leadership, including Hitler himself. This cold and brutally handsome man, three and a half years younger than Himmler, was the son of a distinguished teacher of music, who had once been a performer in opera and came, like Himmler’s mother, from a musical family. Heydrich’s second name was Tristan, and he had begun his own musical studies at an early age. He became an outstanding violinist, but his musical talents did not prevent him undergoing the strict training given to schoolboys at the school in Halle, where the family lived. He was brilliant at school, and it seemed that he could have succeeded equally well in an academic or musical career. He was also a skilled athlete and a notable fencer. His mother, who was a strict Catholic, brought her son up in the Catholic faith; scepticism, however, seems to have developed fairly early in his cold and cruelly intelligent nature, and the traditional faith of his family in German nationalism led him at the age of sixteen to join the nationalist Free Corps movement that spread throughout Germany after the First World War. He decided to abandon a career in music and train to become an officer in the Navy.
His character was already well developed. He was alert, filled with a nervous energy, restless, hard-working, strong-willed and intolerant. His lean face was hard and ruthless, and he had grown over six feet tall. As a naval cadet he soon mastered the technicalities of navigation and he charmed the wife of Commander Canaris, the First Officer of the training cruiser on which he was stationed, by playing to her on the violin. He was invited by Frau Canaris to form a quartet for the performance of chamber music. Meanwhile, his energetic mind turned to the study of languages, and he rapidly gained a fair knowledge of English, French and Russian. He also began to develop his lifelong taste for philandering. In 1926 he was promoted lieutenant, and in 1928, at his own request, he was made a signals and radio officer stationed at Kiel. Here one night at a ball held just before Christmas in 1930 he met a beautiful girl of nineteen, Lina Mathilde von Osten, who was as blonde as himself. Within three days they had become engaged, in spite of the fact that a scandal arose because another blonde girl, the daughter of a prominent industrialist, claimed he was in love with her and she with him. The industrialist, who, unfortunately for Heydrich, was a friend of the Grand Admiral Raeder, used his influence to have Heydrich dismissed the service when he refused to break his official engagement and marry the other girl. He was required to resign his commission in April 1931, and his fiancee insisted on maintaining her engagement to him in spite of the opposition of her parents now that he was disgraced.4
Heydrich took his dismissal very badly. He wept, the only time he ever did so in Lina’s presence. He could think of no future for himself outside the services. But Lina von Osten had other ideas. She was a passionate Nazi, whose conversion had started when at the age of sixteen she had first heard Hitler speak at a meeting in Kiel. She
