Masters of Death (15 page)

Leaderless and jobless after the putsch, living with his disapproving parents, he began fantasizing again of homesteading in the East, going so far, despite his distaste for “Jewish Bolshevism,” as to write the Soviet Embassy early in 1924 asking about prospects for employment in the Ukraine. His reading supported his Eastern fantasies, says Smith; besides “anti-Semitic and
völkisch
readings which became progressively more uncompromising and more extreme as the months went by,” he “particularly welcomed any work that touched on German domination of other people. Rudolf Bartsch’s novel about German landlords in Slavic lands [
Frans Utta und der Jäger
], for example, [Himmler] describes [in an annotated book list he maintained] as a ‘wonderfully pretty and clear German story.’ ”

Smith identifies a voyeuristic component in Himmler’s anti-Semitism. The prude who was saving himself for marriage indulged himself reading banned erotic trash, while condemning Jews as lewdly sensual. Like Hitler, he believed Jewish men seduced German girls for purposes of “race pollution.” Another emerging component of Himmler’s kitsch philosophy was spiritualism — he came to believe in mental telepathy and reincarnation — which allowed him to feel religious while avoiding his political conflicts with Catholicism.

Himmler found employment in Landshut as Gregor Strasser’s “half-starved shrew” in June 1924. Strasser was a Landshut pharmacist before he became a Nazi Gauleiter, and the Gau office that Himmler now organized was located above the Strasser pharmacy. From that office Himmler careened around Bavaria on his Swedish motorbike, venturing farther north as his work and political campaigning expanded; it was during one of these northern forays that Rauschning watched an intense, nervous, damp-handed Himmler inciting the farmers. In a memo from this period that summarizes his political perspective, Himmler called “international Jewish capital” the farmer’s “worst enemy,” because it “set the townsman against the countryman.” German peasantry, he argued, would be tested and strengthened by battling the Slavs:

Particularly in the East there are, today, great masses of land available for purchase; they are now held by the great estates. The sons of farmers and farmworkers must be settled there to prevent the second and third sons of the German farmer from being forced into the towns, as has been the case hitherto. The countryman can only regain decisive influence in Germany by widespread resettlement. . . . Increase of our peasant population is the only effective defense against the influx of the Slav working-class masses from the East. As it was six hundred years ago, the German peasant’s destiny must be to preserve and increase the German people’s patrimony in their holy mother earth in battle against the Slav race.

Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison in December 1924 and reestablished the Nazi Party the following February. Since the SA was still banned throughout most of Germany, he created the SS as a new palace guard that would be legal everywhere. “I told myself that I needed a bodyguard,” as Hitler explained his rationale later, “even a very restricted one, but made up of men who would be enlisted unconditionally, ready even to march against their own brothers. Better a mere twenty men to a city (on condition that one could count on them absolutely) than an unreliable mass.” Himmler, certainly ready to march against his own brother, joined both the SS and the SA in Bavaria, where both were legal. SS memberships were numbered consecutively; indicating his early enlistment, Himmler’s personal SS number was 168. By 1925 he was SS chief in Lower Bavaria, selling subscriptions to the party newspaper and occasionally marching in parade.

When he joined the SS he started reading books on espionage and police work, including torture (which frightened him). The Soviet secret police were “almost completely Jewish,” he decided against all evidence, as the Czar’s secret police had been before, despite the wave of bloody pogroms they had organized and the patently fraudulent
Protocols of
the Elders of Zion
they had cobbled together and loosed upon the world. Otto Strasser believed that one of Himmler’s models was bloody Soviet secret police founder and commissar Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Himmler had already begun thinking about shaping the SS into a caste of noble warriors. He moved to Munich in 1926 to administer the Nazi Party’s propaganda office there. He was too literal-minded to craft effective propaganda, but proximity to the party center revealed his gift for organization and for loyalty, and by 1927 he had won appointment as deputy SS leader. Full responsibility for the three-hundred-man organization came on 6 January 1929, when Hitler appointed him Reichsführer-SS; he was twenty-eight years old. “The SS will be an Order sworn to the Führer,” he told Otto Strasser. “For him I could do anything. Believe me, if Hitler were to say I should shoot my mother, I would do it and be proud of his confidence.” Strasser told Himmler he made him shudder. Himmler liked the acknowledgment of his potential for personal violence, however bogus, and the phrase became a running joke between them.

In 1927 in Berlin Himmler had met a sturdy nurse of Polish origin named Margarete Concerzowo. Marga, seven years his senior, shared his enthusiasm for alternative medicine and probably won him with mothering. “Size 50 knickers,” Heydrich’s more stylish wife would say in ridicule of the woman Himmler married in 1928—“that’s all there was to her.” Lina Heydrich considered Marga a “narrow-minded, humorless blonde female, always worrying about protocol; she ruled her husband and could twist him around her little finger.” When they married, Marga sold the small nursing home she operated in Berlin and the Himmlers bought a modest working farm outside Munich, where they raised chickens and grew herbs for sale. Himmler’s daughter, Gudrun, was born the following year, attended by a doctor who had been a medical associate of Marga’s. The doctor’s son, twenty-four-year-old Viktor Brack, became Himmler’s driver. (Later, advanced into the Führer Chancellery of the Nazi Party
²³
and serving as a liaison officer with the department of health, Brack would manage the Nazi euthanasia killing program and contribute to the development of the gas vans used to murder the disabled and then the Jews.)

To build the SS, Himmler sought out disaffected middle- and upper-middle-class young men, as well as sons of the former nobility. Many of them had been active in the Freikorps, which means many of them, perhaps the majority of them, already had experience with serious violence. “From 1929 onwards,” writes historian Heinz Höhne, “[Freikorps men] began to stream into the SS. They came in two waves; first appeared the veterans [of the Great War] who had neither wished nor been able to reintegrate themselves into society. . . . The [Great Depression] produced a second wave of applicants for the SS. This time they were men who had managed to get a foot in the door of everyday life, but had lost their positions in the pitiless competition of a free economy. The spur which drove them into SS uniform was bankruptcy.”

Himmler offered these disaffected men a vision of membership in a new nobility. The old nobility had claimed its right of inheritance by blood; Himmler’s new nobility would make a similar claim, but the blood would not be restricted within families but pseudospeciated, identifying a supposedly “Nordic” (alternatively, “Aryan”) race with inherited physical and moral superiorities. Its duty would be to win
Lebensraum
in the East so that Germany could eventually dominate the world—a hypertrophy of Himmler’s own earlier private fantasies of making a new life for himself in Russia. As he explained his vision in June 1931 to an audience of SS leaders:

For us, standing sublime above all doubt, it is the blood carrier who can make history; the Nordic race is decisive not only for Germany, but for the whole world. Should we succeed in establishing this Nordic race again from and around Germany and inducing them to become farmers, and from this seedbed producing a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us. Should Bolshevism win, it will signify the destruction of the Nordic race . . . devastation, the end of the world. . . . We are called, therefore, to create a basis on which the next generation can make history.

Nazi racist visions have come to seem ridiculous, and there were many who scoffed at them even in their heyday. Nazism’s similarity to a religious cult helps explain them. As religious cults do, Nazism offered impassioned followers a charismatic leader and beliefs that resonated for people whose lives had been shattered by conflict, economic hardship and loss of faith in traditional institutions. The vision that Himmler and a few like-minded colleagues assembled of a restored, superior “race” colonizing the East as soldier-farmers prepared to defend the West from the “Asiatic hordes”—meaning Slavs and Jews—gave positive valence to Nazi anti-Semitic scapegoating. It was a visionary program, modernized with pseudoscientific eugenic claptrap, that offered potential followers both high-minded goals and practical rewards. “It remains the great and decisive achievement of the
Reichsführer,
” an SS propagandist wrote astutely, “that—at a time when the racial question was still regarded by the movement as a purely negative notion of antiSemitism—he included theoretical ideas of Nazi Weltanschauung in his own organization of the SS and helped them to prevail.”

Despite this elitist, utopian program, until Hitler became Reich Chancellor, on 30 January 1933, Himmler accepted into the SS whomever he could get, expanding the SS by that date to a membership of more than fifty thousand men. Thereafter applications rolled in and he could afford to be selective; between 1933 and 1935, with hundreds of thousands of new members, he claimed to have expelled sixty thousand, a process he called “combing out the useless material.” Discussing the selection process later and changing the metaphor, he spoke of going about it “like a nursery gardener, trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded, quite unashamedly, to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the buildup of the SS.”

Leon Trotsky understood Nazi intentions in the East very well, alerted as he had been to German territorial aspirations in 1918, when he negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In September 1933, having escaped to America, he analyzed in
Harper’s Magazine
a Hitler speech that purported to defend the Third Reich’s pacifism:

The assurances given by the National Socialists that they renounce “Germanization” do not signify that they renounce conquests, for one of the central and most persistent ideas in their program is the occupation of vast territories in “the East” so that a strong German peasantry may be established there.... The renunciation of Germanization signifies, in this connection, the principle of the privileged position of the Germanic “race” as the seignorial caste in the occupied territories. The Nazis are against assimilation but not against annexation. They prefer the extermination of the conquered “inferior” peoples to their Germanization. For the time being, fortunately, this is only a matter of hypothetical conquests.

. . . [But] Hitler is preparing for war.

From one side of the Nazi mouth, then, a perverted idealism; from the other, territorial and exterminatory ambitions. Hitler was far more ruthless and nihilistic than Himmler, who had his gentrified middle-class pretensions to protect; the Führer sometimes ridiculed his Reichsführer’s mystical elitism. But Hitler no less than Himmler dreamed of
Lebensraum.
He discussed it specifically, and hinted at mass exterminations, as early as his 1931 confidential interviews with Leipzig newspaper editor Richard Breitling (Breitling kept verbatim shorthand notes that were transcribed and authenticated after the war). Hitler told the editor:

We propose to build a protective wall against Russian imperialism and the Slavs from Northern Norway to the Black Sea, for we must not forget that Stalin’s communism is a new form of Russian imperialism. . . . If, despite our justifiable action, armed conflicts ensue because world Jewry would like to turn back the wheel of history, Jewry will be crushed by that same wheel. . . .

The menace to western civilization was never so great. Even before we assume power we must make clear . . . that sooner or later we shall be forced to conduct a crusade against bolshevism. . . . We must already be thinking of the resettlement of millions of men from Germany and Europe. Migrations of people have always taken place. . . . We must colonize the East ruthlessly.

We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy; we do not wish to go on treading on each other’s toes in Germany. In 1923 little Greece could resettle a million men. Think of the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages . . . and remember the extermination of the Armenians. One eventually reaches the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological modeling clay.

SIX

Truehearted Heinrich II

In 1934 there was unrest in Germany. The Nazi regime had not delivered the jobs that the millions of unemployed had expected. The conservatives who had helped Hitler to the chancellorship were organizing to eject him before Hindenburg died. The German professional army — the Reichswehr—feared the growing power of Ernst Röhm’s SA, almost four million strong and in Röhm’s opinion a people’s army to which the Reichswehr ought to be subordinated. In response to these and other challenges, Hitler ordered a purge. For the instrument of its execution he chose the SS, which was still small compared with the SA, focused on police work and therefore not a threat to the Reichswehr.

Himmler and Heydrich organized the arrests, trumping up allegations that the SA was planning a putsch. SS-Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, who commanded the Leibstandarte-SS, Hitler’s personal bodyguard battalion, armed two of its companies with weapons the Reichswehr provided. Early in the morning on Saturday, 30 June 1934, Hitler personally burst into Röhm’s room at the Bad Wiesee resort where the SA leader and his captains had been carousing and arrested him at pistol point. Gregor Strasser was among the hundreds arrested. Firing squads rattled the neighborhood around Berlin’s Lichterfelde barracks all the next day.