Masters of Death (14 page)

The Freikorps paramilitaries were raised first of all for the recovery of the lost eastern frontiers. One Freikorps veteran, Ernst von Salomon, who later participated in the assassination of Walter Rathenau,
¹⁹
romanticized the paramilitary invasions in a notorious memoir,
Τhe Outlaws,
that evokes at least the martial side of Himmler’s belligerent rustic fantasy:

What we wanted we did not know; but what we knew we did not want. To force a way through the prisoning wall of the world, to march over burning fields, to stamp over ruins and scattered ashes, to dash recklessly through wild forests, over blasted heaths, to push, conquer, eat our way through towards the East, to the white, hot, dark, cold land that stretched between ourselves and Asia—was that what we wanted? I do not know whether that was our desire, but that was what we did. And the search for reasons why was lost in the tumult of continuous fighting.

In Himmler’s fantasy the East was the place where his personal and social insecurities would fall away and he could thrive and triumph. To mask his lack of success with women, he had announced that he intended to remain a virgin until marriage. Finding an ideal partner and emigrating eastward merge in the first entry he made in his diary mentioning his plans. “For whom I work,” he wrote on 11 November 1919, “at present I do not know. I work because it is my duty, because I find peace in work, and I work for my ideal of German womanhood with whom, some day, I will live my life in the East and fight my battles as a German far from beautiful Germany.”

To implement his new program he planned a year or two as a
Praktikant
working on a farm and then agronomy study at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, which despite its name was the equivalent of an American engineering college. His farming
Praktikum
began in September 1919—mucking horse stalls and sheaving grain — but after only a few weeks of work he contracted paratyphoid, a milder variety of typhoid fever with similar symptoms. Three weeks in the hospital and a diagnosis of heart strain ended his
Praktikum.
He moved to Munich and enrolled at the Technische Hochschule at the end of October 1919; his first diary entry on a life in the East followed two weeks later.

Success at violent performances is only one of the many possible ways out of belligerency; otherwise all brutalized children would grow up to become violent adults. Himmler’s belligerency coincided with, and was prolonged by, the Great War, which culminated in Germany’s defeat and social breakdown. Those events might have demonstrated the limitations of violence as a way of resolving conflict, but the defeat seemed to many Germans to have been stolen from victory. Himmler was left as well with the private frustration of never having been tested. He could pretend to be a soldier. “Today I have put the uniform on again,” he wrote unctuously on 1 December 1919 after enrolling in a reserve unit. “For me it is always the most precious clothing one can wear.” Other diary entries from this period reveal the fragility of this pretense, however, and chart a new pugnaciousness that would flower in the course of time to poisonous bloom. Bradley Smith summarizes:

In his relations with people of his own age Heinrich was self-conscious and wary of circumstances which might tear away his protective veil and show him as weak, awkward, or incapable. He assumed an outward posture of self-assurance that bordered on aggressiveness and nearly always tried to seize the initiative in conversations with his peers. Yet the difficulty of maintaining this stance gnawed away at him. He was frequently torn by self-doubt and had repeated periods of severe depression in which he despaired of himself and his future and snapped at friends and acquaintances. In the spring of 1920 his ill temper led to a long feud with his parents.

A new opportunity for violent experience arose in November 1919, when Himmler was accepted into a dueling fraternity, the Bund Apollo. Student dueling as college and university fraternities practiced it in Germany at that time was more than a sport but less than a fully violent contest. The contestants trained in protective gear. For the
Mensur
itself they used sharpened but unpointed sabers, wore padded clothing, guarded their necks with swaths of silk and their eyes with an iron frame. They slashed away standing in position inside a circle; cutting wounds to the face and head were the goal, which were then sutured without anesthesia. The contest itself and the surgical procedure that followed were therefore tests of fortitude and stoicism but only imitations of serious violence. “Unlike other one-on-one sporting contests,” writes dueling historian Kevin McAleer, “the
Mensur
was a discipline in which there was neither winner nor loser. Bouts might be stopped on the basis of blood loss, and there were head-cut tallies, but everybody emerged victorious for having gamely stood the test.” A 1912 student petition McAleer cites explains that “it is only required that each combatant ‘stood up well,’ that he betrayed no fear of the blows, of the wounds, that pain elicited no cry.”

Serious dueling — dueling to the death to settle a conflict or an insult to one’s honor—arose among the nobility in early modern Europe at a time when states were centralizing. In medieval days the nobility had dominated its demesnes with serious violence, enforcing decrees, claiming and defending territory and levying tribute much as present-day mafiosi do. To assert authority and collect taxes, centralizing governments had to limit such private violence. Monarchs did so in part by establishing courts that the nobility had to attend as disarmed courtiers to seek royal favor. Monarchs also outlawed violent personal contests. The duel, a formalized violent personal contest, then developed outside the law as an implicit political protest, an assertion by the nobility that while it was prepared to bend its knee to the monarch in matters of taxation and social control, it did not recognize the monarch’s writ in matters of personal honor. Seventeenth-century Prussia thus interpreted duels to be “insults” to the state on two levels, McAleer writes: “The theft [by their loss of life in duels] of such citizenry as officers and officials who could render it valuable service, and the rape of justice through infringement of its sovereignty in the administration of law.” The punishment for dueling varied from monarch to monarch and from century to century, but in the early days of its development the essentially treasonable practice was punished by summary execution.

Serious dueling was thus an assertion of noble status. Through all the changes that came to dueling as it spread to the officer class of the military and to the upper-middle bourgeois, the practice remained linked to higher social status — an allusion to the nobility’s former violent independence from state authority. In modified form it thrived in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. The
Mensur
was only an imitation of serious dueling, carrying nothing like the same degree of risk, but it borrowed the reputation of its riskier counterpart. To be chosen to participate was a recognition of status, which
Mensur
scars made visible for life.

Himmler did not like watching student dueling at first. Given his weak-kneed reaction later to reviewing an Einsatzgruppen massacre staged on his behalf, the obstacle was probably squeamishness: head cuts bleed profusely. He coveted the endorsement of social status a successful duel would bring, however, and forced himself to watch and learn. He probably also thought the
Mensur
would establish his manly reputation. Dueling was so important to him that his church’s disapproval of the practice precipitated his first religious crisis.

His family was Roman Catholic; up to this time—the autumn and winter of 1919— he had been a practicing Catholic, says Bradley Smith:

He was concerned lest fraternity dueling might conflict with the teachings of the church. Since his membership in Apollo was very important to him, he was seriously troubled. A short sermon he heard on the day after Christmas 1919 . . . brought these doubts to a head: “During the sermon I had to endure an inner struggle more serious than any before. The dueling business constantly keeps cropping up. In the evening I prayed. I had, of course, earlier partly overcome it. God will continue to help me overcome my doubts.”

“Only very gradually,” Smith adds, “after much inner soul-searching and after reassuring talks with his father, was he able to free himself from his torment and feel completely at ease in the
Bund.
” But Himmler’s increasing hostility to religion dates from this time.

Overcoming religious scruples only needed sufficient rationalization; arranging a
Mensur
required a willing partner. Himmler had great difficulty finding one. Across his student years he was hardening into an aggressive, pompous, condescending prig nearly devoid of a sense of humor. A year of
Praktikum
on a farm where he was treated as a young gentleman, with easy work, a place at the family table, packages from home and a maid to clean his room bolstered his self-satisfaction without improving his character; in May 1921, for example, when his brother Gebhard was awarded an Iron Cross First Class for his war service, Himmler jealously escalated his assaults on his brother’s temperament. Back in Munich in 1922 for his final year at the Technische Hochschule he ran for pledgemaster of his fraternity and lost. “He was not very popular with his fraternity brothers,” Smith reports, “some of whom quite openly expressed their lack of confidence in him. The fixity of his ideas and his continuous organizing and gossiping did nothing to break down the barriers to his social acceptance.”

Facing social disapproval during this final year of school, Himmler enjoined himself to “stop talking too much” but intensified rather than modulated his right-wing radicalism. Anti-Semitism, which purported to identify hidden Jewish manipulations, was promoted in Germany as a ready explanation for almost any kind of real or perceived adversity; that year Himmler rapidly embraced anti-Semitism, began spying out Jews among fellow students and family acquaintances and made his first contacts with Captain Ernst Röhm, a Freikorps freebooter who was organizing a protective bodyguard for Hitler—which would become the Sturmabteilung, the brown-shirted SA. Only in June 1922, six weeks before he graduated, did Himmler finally find someone willing to duel him.

He fought his
Mensur
on 17 June 1922. “I certainly did not get agitated,” he wrote afterward. “Stood very well and fought technically beautifully. My opponent was Herr Renner, Alemanians [Bund], he struck honest blows.” Himmler took five cuts and maintained his composure during their suturing. “I really did not flinch once,” he brags of the suturing. “Distl held my head in old comradeship. . . . Did not sleep especially well because the bandage was always pulling.” He had proven his fortitude without proving his violent resolution.

There are references in Himmler’s diary, from summer 1922, to his satisfaction with the assassination (on 24 June) of the “scoundrel” Walter Rathenau, to target practice with hand weapons and a machine gun and to an unsuccessful attempt to volunteer for a political assassination squad. So many coincidental setbacks in Himmler’s pursuit of violent performances—missing war service as an officer candidate, joining the Landshut Freikorps too late to fight the Munich Soviet republic, delaying his
Mensur
with arrogant behavior he chose not to change and now again failing to convince the leader of an assassination squad that he should be given what he called in his diary “special assignments”— strongly suggest that he maneuvered across the years of his young adult-hood to avoid having to risk any serious violent personal encounter while using militaristic posturing to promote a violent reputation. The
Mensur
itself was just such a sham, which explains in part why Himmler was prepared to jettison his religion if necessary to accomplish it. In the fullness of his power he would become a
Schreibtischtäter,
a desk murderer,
²⁰
a physical coward willing and even eager to order others to kill. Such cowards are potentially far more destructive than the violent individuals they appoint to kill in their behalf: maintaining their fraudulent violent personal reputations requires projecting a maleficence sufficiently extreme to disguise their personal cowardice, which is made easier because in ordering blood to be shed they suffer no personal trauma, nor are they constrained by personal risk.

Himmler graduated from the Technische Hochschule in August 1922 with a degree in agronomy. His career path soon intersected Hitler’s. As the developing German hyperinflation wiped out his family’s assets and his own savings, he found a job researching manures for a fertilizer company in Schleissheim, a town just north of Munich that happened to be a hotbed of right-wing paramilitary activity. He joined Ernst Röhm’s Reichsflagge
²¹
paramilitary group, which federated with several other groups in 1923 under an umbrella organization that Hitler controlled. In August, following Röhm, Himmler joined the Nazi Party as well. He followed Röhm into a splinter paramilitary group Röhm organized, the Reichskriegsflagge.
²²
In mid-September, after quitting his manure research, he was accepted into a replacement unit of the Bavarian army, Company Werner.

Through the interactions of these various organizations, it so happened that when Hitler attempted his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on 8–9 November 1923, Himmler carried the flag, marching with his brother Gebhard and four hundred other men of the Reichskriegsflagge to the War Ministry, where Röhm ordered them to occupy the building and surround it with a barbed-wire barricade. It was for the purpose of rescuing the Reichskriegsflagge that Hitler and two thousand fellow putschists linked arms and marched into the Odeonplatz the next day, where a firefight started with the Munich police. Hitler dislocated his shoulder diving for cover (or being dragged down by the weight of the man shot dead next to him; accounts vary). At the War Ministry Röhm was arrested, but the rank and file, including the Himmler brothers, were merely disarmed and sent home. “Toward the authorities,” Smith reports of the aftermath, “Heinrich was very bitter, his mood alternating between imaginary fears of his own arrest and disappointment that the government was not interested in him.” He began to suspect that people were opening his mail.