The Himmler's SS (57 page)

Forty-eight hours later, Hitler was dead and the Third Reich was at an end. In its stead, confusion and chaos reigned. Grand Admiral Dönitz, head of the rump Nazi government, confirmed that he had no place for Himmler in his short-lived administration. SS officers and men from all branches of the organisation, fearful of the reprisals which they were sure would be directed against them, burned their uniforms, files and identity papers, cast aside their daggers, swords and death's head rings, gathered what loot and booty they could, and fled into hiding. Those captured were put to work clearing up the mess, then herded into Dachau and other camps pending a de-Nazification process and possible criminal proceedings. The dreaded day of reckoning had arrived.

One of the veteran Totenkopf NCOs at Belsen being searched by British soldiers after the liberation of the camp, 17 April 1945.

SS officers and men clearing dead bodies at Belsen, 17 April 1945. At the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, the prisoners at Auschwitz, Majdanek and the other extermination camps were marched westwards in front of the Russian advance and deposited at concentration camps in Germany. These were the ‘human skeletons' whom the British and Americans freed at the end of the war.

For Himmler, the cease-fire concluded by Dönitz on 5 May 1945 marked the end of the road. All the Wehrmacht officers who had hastily gathered around the Grand Admiral, desperate to avoid charges of war crimes being levelled against them, now shifted the blame for Nazi Germany's conduct totally on to the SS and the person of the Reichsführer. On 6 May, Himmler mustered his remaining faithful entourage including his brother Gebhard, Hans Prützmann, Léon Degrelle, and various Hauptamt chiefs, police generals and Waffen-SS leaders, and gave a final farewell speech. He ended by handing out prepared false identity documents, and advised his followers to ‘submerge in the Wehrmacht'. Each then went his own way. Himmler furnished himself with the papers of a former military police sergeant named Heinrich Hitzinger, who had earlier been executed by the SS for defeatism. He also carried a phial of cyanide, and had a hole drilled in one of his molars to accommodate it. There was no doubt in his mind about his fate and that of his chief accomplices should they fall into enemy hands.

SS-Standartenführer Walther Rauff (left), head of the security police in Milan, surrenders to the Americans on 30 April 1945. Rauff was also a Korvetten-Kapitän der Reserve in the navy, and took part in Kriegsmarine actions in North Africa, for which he received the ‘Afrika' campaign cuff title, seen here being worn on the sleeve of his SS uniform.

On 10 May, Himmler set out on foot from Flensburg to Bavaria. He was escorted by SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Grothmann and SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinz Macher, both in army uniform. Grothmann, only twenty-nine years old, had been the Reichsführer's personal aide-de-camp since 1943, and was one of his most loyal subordinates. Macher, although four years younger, was a hardened combat veteran and had won the Oakleaves to his Knight's Cross in 1944 while serving with ‘Das Reich' in Russia. It was Macher who had blown up Wewelsburg Castle the previous month on Himmler's direct instructions, to prevent its capture by the Allies, and he had also been charged with the task of burying the castle's treasures, including over 9,000 death's head rings held in the shrine to commemorate SS men killed in action. Protected by these two stalwarts, Himmler intended to join the many other SS and NSDAP leaders who had fled south-east to the Alps. On 21 May, however, the three men were arrested by the British at a routine check-point between Hamburg and Bremen. Two days later they arrived at an interrogation centre at Barfeld, near Lüneburg, where the former Reichsführer's identity was confirmed. As his elated captors began to question him, Himmler bit on the cyanide capsule and was dead within minutes, thus escaping the humiliation of a show trial and the certain fate of a hangman's noose. He was subsequently buried in an unmarked grave on Lüneburg Heath, and his false identity disc, spectacles and few other meagre possessions were distributed among the attendant Allied intelligence personnel as souvenirs.

Leibstandarte and ‘Der Führer' officers attached to the 24th SS Division surrender to the British near Treviso in northern Italy, 7 May 1945. The Obersturmführer on the left, with the tropical field cap and shorts, wears the Guerrilla Warfare Badge in Silver above his other awards.

Only a small number of SS leaders followed Himmler's example by committing suicide. Among them were Hans Prützmann, Philipp Bouhler, Herbert Backe, Leonardo Conti, Odilo Globocnik, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger and Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the latter blowing both himself and his family up with hand grenades. Christian Weber, the old Stosstrupp veteran, was killed in action in Bavaria at the end of the war and Karl Hanke, the last Reichsführer-SS, was beaten to death by Czechs a couple of months later. Many SS officers, including the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, the Concentration Camp Inspector-General Richard Glücks, and the infamous Dr Josef Mengele, simply disappeared underground as Himmler had recommended.

Himmler after his suicide, 23 May 1945.

During the second half of 1945, the victorious Allies engaged upon a concerted effort to root out and round up all former members of the SS, which they declared had been an illegal and terrorist organisation. Their primary objective was to put the leaders before a military tribunal, to answer charges of war crimes. Mass arrests followed and 32,000 ex-SS men were incarcerated at Dachau alone by the end of the year. Franz Breithaupt died at Prien soon after being taken into British custody, and Maximilian von Herff suffered a similar fate at Cornshead Priory POW camp on Lake Windermere in September, the same month in which Walter Schmitt expired in Dablice as a captive of the Czechs. Those who were duly put on trial at Nürnberg and elsewhere during 1946–7 received a variety of sentences. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Oswald Pohl, Arthur Greiser, Karl Hermann Frank, Kurt Daluege, Karl Gebhardt, Friedrich Jeckeln, Karl Brandt and Albert Forster, along with a further eighteen less well-known SS and police generals, were condemned to death and executed for their involvement in the Nazi extermination policy. Large numbers of more junior personnel who had staffed concentration camps, served in Einsatz-gruppen or taken part in Waffen-SS atrocities were similarly dealt with. Gottlob Berger was sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment, Werner Lorenz and Hans Lammers each received twenty years in jail, Wilhelm Keppler got ten years, and Walter Buch was condemned to five years' hard labour before committing suicide. Gustav-Adolf Scheel and Walter Schellenberg were each given five years' imprisonment, and Otto Dietrich one year. Erich von dem Bach, a prime candidate for the death sentence, saved his neck and avoided extradition to Poland by acting as a witness for the prosecution at Nürnberg. The majority of these men served out their terms of imprisonment, which were often reduced on appeal or for good behaviour, and went on to enjoy comfortable lives in postwar West Germany. Indeed, for years thereafter, Allied intelligence agencies frequently sought the advice of Schellenberg and his former RSHA colleagues, and paid handsomely for the benefit of their expertise in espionage and interrogation techniques.

A chart depicting the organisation of the RSHA is displayed at Nürnberg during the trials of SS and SD men, 20 December 1946.

As for the other former SS commanders and notable personalities, Franz Xaver Schwarz succumbed to ill-health in Regensburg internment camp in 1947, while Ulrich Greifelt died in February 1949 at Landsberg, also after a long illness. Ulrich Graf perished a pauper in Munich in March 1950, followed by Richard Hildebrandt in 1951. Richard Walther Darré expired from liver failure two years later, Rudolf Diels accidentally shot and killed himself during a hunting expedition in November 1957, and Max Amann died in poverty the same year having had all the wealth which he accrued from publishing
Mein Kampf
confiscated by a de-Nazification tribunal. Heinz Reinefarth, the first SS member to win the Knight's Cross and commander of police units involved in crushing the Warsaw uprising, was luckier, taking up a career in local government and rising to the post of Bürgermeister of Westerland in 1958. His close police associate, Alfred Wünnenberg, died in Krefeld in 1963. Karl Wolff, always a ‘smooth talker', built up a successful public relations business until he received a belated ten-year prison sentence in 1964, following revelations at the Eichmann trial. Hans Jüttner died at Bad Tölz in 1965, and in 1966 four former Waffen-SS generals, namely ‘Sepp' Dietrich, Georg Keppler, Herbert Gille and Felix Steiner, all succumbed to various illnesses and were buried after funeral services openly attended by hundreds of Waffen-SS veterans. Julius Schaub pursued his profession as a Munich chemist until his demise in 1967, while Karl Fiehler and Jakob Grimminger both died in obscurity in 1969. Emil Maurice, the part-Jewish holder of SS membership number 2 (Hitler held number 1) lived until 1972, the same year as ninety-two-year-old Paul Hausser, the revered ‘Father of the Waffen-SS', was laid to rest in the presence of his old comrades. Werner Lorenz died in 1974, Gottlob Berger in 1975, and August Heissmeyer in 1979. The last surviving Hauptamt chief, Karl Wolff, gave up the ghost at Rosenheim in 1984. With his death, the former top-ranking SS leadership and the lingering Old Guard of the organisation were finally extinguished.