Chapter 1

In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people.
Adolf Hitler

The Devils Duo: Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Rhm

dolf Hitler was the most powerful man in Europe years before the United States entered World War II. His chosen successor, Reichsmarshall Hermann Gring, was also one of Germanys most dominant leaders. However powerful the former air ace was as the head of a mighty Luftwaffe at warand notwithstanding his general corruptness and megalomaniaGring was forced to operate within the conventional framework of the armed forces, and all the restrictions that system entailed. He had stood side-by-side with Hitler during the Austrians climb to power, and was first in line in responsibility for victory in Poland and the Low Countries. But Grings fortunes rested upon a foundation of military successes. Humiliation over the skies of Britain and the humbling experience above the steppes of Russia dimmed his star. Two other dominant personalities also played an important role in the rise of Nazism and Adolf Hitler during the 1920s and 1930s. Their quasi-military organizations were not hampered by traditional bureau-

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cratic niceties or other such impedimenta. Laws and tradition existed only to be broken and extinguished. Only one of the leaders survived to witness the outbreak of war in 1939. His star rose during the heady days of 1939-1941and kept on rising as setbacks in the east and west mounted. His position within the Third Reich was less conspicuous than that of Grings, and the power he wielded was almost absolute.

The character of one of the Nazi regimes most brutal officers continues to fascinate historians. Despite his explicit and freely admitted responsibility for monstrous cruelty against his fellow man, the dichotomy that was Heinrich Himmler remains. Born in Munich on October 7, 1900, Himmler was the son of a pious authoritarian Roman Catholic schoolmaster who had once been tutor to the Bavarian Crown Prince. His early career in life was singularly unimpressive. Education during his formative years was taken in Landshut. While a teenager, he trained as an officer cadet and served with the 11th Bavarian Regiment, but did not see active service before the end of World War I. Unlike Hitler, however, Himmler did not outwardly manifest vehement infuriation at the harsh outcome imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Returning home, he entered Munichs School of Technology in 1918 and emerged four years later with a degree in agriculture. The first few years of the 1920s passed quietly while Himmler labored as a fertilizer salesman and poultry farmer. Quiet, non-violent, and outwardly unemotional, the young man was described by one who knew him well as an intelligent schoolmaster. But inside that calm schoolmasters demeanor was something terribly wrong. By 1923 Himmler had acquired a deep interest in German politics. Setting aside his quiet life of agriculture, he participated in Hitlers abortive Beer Hall Putsch and joined Ernst Rhms criminal paramilitary organization, the Reichskriegsflagge (Reich War Flag). By 1925 he was a full member of the Nazi party as well as the black-shirted SS (Schutzstaffeln), Hitlers personal armed bodyguard. A succession of positions of power within the fledgling party were now open to him; promotions flew in his direction. In 1926 he became the partys assistant

Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Rhm

propaganda leader. After marrying in 1927 and briefly returning to poultry farming, Hitler tapped him to run the SS, at that time a small body comprised of about 200 men. The following year Himmler was elected as a Nazi Reichstag deputy. For the next three years he worked tirelessly on Hitlers behalf, guaranteeing his own continued rise to power. After the Nazis seized the countrys political machinery in 1933, Himmler was appointed police president in Munich and head of the Bavarian political police. This authority and control gave Himmler exactly what he had been seeking for years: the power base to broaden and deepen his SS and organize the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, a separate ideological intelligence department within the SS under the command of Reinhard Heydrich. It also distanced him from Ernst Rhms Sturmabteilung, or SA, Hitlers paramilitary police. Himmler took the opportunity to set up the first concentration camp at Dachau, where political opponents and undesirables were housed in what was euphemistically called protective custody. Throughout these early years Himmler demonstrated an amazing organizational ability, especially with regard to the formation of political alliances within the Nazi hierarchy. The superficially cool officer was a survivor, an ambitious climber who craved power.1 According to one author, Himmler used his new powers in 1933 to begin constructing a state within the state, a shadow government that answered to no one. Membership in his SS grew from 200 to more than 50,000 before the end of 1933. The ideology driving Himmler, and thus the SS, was an unhealthy preoccupation with religion, Nordic myths, and Aryan genealogy. As a result, the SS was constructed on the organized principles of the order of the Jesuits. The service statutes and spiritual exercises prescribed by Ignatius Loyola were emulated. Indeed, Himmlers title, Reichsfhrer, was intended as the counterpart of the Jesuits General of Order. The complete structure of the SS leadership was adopted from Himmlers studies of the hierarchic order of the Catholic Church. His domination expanded during this time when he secured the SSs independence from control of Ernst Rhms SA, to which the SS was initially subordinated. Together with Reinhard Heydrichs SD, Himmler continued his ceaseless labors to consolidate his power. In September 1933 he was made commander of all the political police units outside Prussia and, though formally still under

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Grings control, became head of the Prussian Police and Gestapo on April 20, 1934. Up until now Himmlers rise within the party hierarchy had been little short of meteoric. Only one man stood in the way of his complete consolidation of power.
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Like Himmler, Ernst Rhm was also born in Munich. Other than their mutual association with Adolf Hitler, however, similarities were few and far between. Rhm served honorably in World War I. By the time Germany surrendered in 1918 he was the recipient of three combat wounds and held the rank of captain. Like so many men after that disastrous war, Rhms postwar goals were ill-defined at best. Yearning for structure he joined the Friekorps, a radical right-wing group of armed associations organized to defend the countrys borders against the threat of communist invasion. After participating in the Friekorpss bloody slaughter of hundreds of communists and socialists in March 1919, Rhm steeped himself in nascent right-wing party politics. It was Rhm who secured the services of a young Adolf Hitler to spy on the German Workers Party (GWP), which Rhm soon joined. Like so many others, Rhm found Hitler to be a charismatic comrade. At his urging, Rhm led a group of armed storm troopers in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. Tried and found guilty of treasonable acts, Rhm escaped prison but was booted from the German army. Hitler was much smarter than Rhm. Instead of trying to defend himself on the few merits of his position, Hitler turned his trial into a political discourse that elevated his prestige even as he later languished in Landsberg prison. In these early years of the Nazi movement Rhms Brownshirts had been an indispensable element of Hitlers success, a magnet that had attracted thousands of disaffected recruits into the Party. From within Landsberg the future leader of Germany came to realize that Rhms thirst for direct military confrontation with the German State was not the true course to power. He began to disassociate himself from a man he now viewed as an undesirable. Discarded by Hitler, Rhm withdrew from political life. The few jobs he held frustrated and bored him. Only an offer from Bolivia to serve as a military instructor preserved in Rhm some vestige of self worth. But history was not yet finished with the

Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Rhm

stocky native of Munich. The round chubby-faced ex-captain with a deep scar on one cheek, uneven mustache, and biting, porcine eyes, had one more act to play in the drama unfolding within Germanys borders.2 While Rhm toiled, Hitler plotted a new course for the SA. Shedding its paramilitary garb, Hitler honed the organization into a political weapon wholly subordinated to the NSDAP, or Nazi party. Hitlers significant electoral victory in 1930 prompted him to recall Rhm as the SAs chief of staff though only after Hitler had assumed the position of Supreme Leader of the organization. Rhm rapidly expanded the SA into a popular army of street fighters, gangsters, and thugs. By 1934 the unemployed and disaffected swelled the ranks of the SA to several (loosely organized) millions. Rhm regarded this plebeian army of desperadoes as the core of the Nazi movement, the embodiment and guarantee of a permanent revolution. Under his leadership the SA fulfilled an indispensable role in Hitlers rise to power between 1930 and 1933. Spreading propaganda and terror, Rhms brownshirts won the battle of the streets against the communists and other political opposition. As 1934 dawned, Rhms private army was as powerful as the German Army itself. But while Rhm was conquering the streets for Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany had again come full circle in his thinking: his SA chief was no longer necessary. Indeed the SA chief was now a threat to Hitler. Rhm had become disillusioned with the Nazi revolution. The growing bureaucratic Nazi movement angered Rhm, who dreamed of a soldiers state and the primacy of the soldier over the politician. Provided a seat on the National Defence Council in 1933, Rhm vocalized his dissatisfaction over the use of his SA. In October he sent an ominous letter to Walther von Reichenau, the liaison officer between the German army and the Nazi Party. I regard the Reichswehr [German army] now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in the future is the task of the SA. Rhm insisted on maintaining momentum in a socialist direction while talking openly about the conquest of Germany. His populist demagogy alienated the middle class and the industrialists, whose support Hitler was still seeking and desperately needed. Rhm failed to understand Hitlers concept of a gradual insurrection carried out under the cloak of legality. The real revolution, warned Rhm, was yet to come.

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If Hitler did not readily admit and recognize it, his chief supporters did: Rhm had to go. The head of the SA overplayed his hand by antagonizing two dangerous rivals, Hermann Gring and Heinrich Himmler. Both feared the SA leader, who was potentially strong enough to crush them. Both pressured Hitler to reduce his power and exposure by utilizing the SS and the Gestapo to do so. Rhms own conduct and that of his entourage, given to dissolute homosexual orgies and drinking bouts, loutish behavior, and wildly indiscreet remarks, made the task of his enemies that much easier. Still, Hitler hesitated. How could he eliminate his oldest comrade-in-arms, a man to whom he felt a debt of gratitude and a certain warmtheven though he had become a liability and even a danger to his regime? In goose-stepped Heinrich Himmler and his SS. Together with several officers of the German army, Himmler plotted Rhms spectacular demise. Heydrich, head of Himmlers SD arm, was ordered to compile a damning dossier. The SA leader, Heydrich discovered, had accepted millions of marks from the French to launch a coup and oust Hitler. Hitler knew the record was untrue, but he saw the opportunity to finally be rid of Rhmand seized it. Taken utterly by surprise, Rhm was arrested on June 30, 1934, in a private hotel at Bad Wiessee, a small Bavarian spa south of Munich where he was taking a holiday with other SA leaders. He was taken to Stadelheim prison, where he was executed two days later by firing squad after refusing to take his own life. It was an ironic end for the man who had once uttered, All revolutions devour their own children.3 The bloody purge was kept secret until the middle of July, when Hitler mentioned the action during a speech and gave it a name that would resonate through history: The Night of the Long Knives. Hitler publicly branded Rhm a traitor and accused him of having fomented a nationwide plot to overthrow the government. In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people, shouted Hitler in his explanation of why he did not use the German justice system to try Rhm. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason. Hitler professed outrage at the homosexual aspects of Rhm and his criminal entourage, although the leaders lifestyle had been well known and tolerated for many years. Scores and perhaps hundreds perished in the purge that both ended the

Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Rhm

influence of the SA and gained for Hitler the acceptance of the German officer corps and support of many industrialists. When President Paul von Hindenburg died five weeks later, the former World War I corporal became head of state.4 Himmler, too, was the beneficiary of a Nazi apparatus unfettered with the likes of an Ernst Rhm. The flow of SA blood paved the way for the emergence of the more military SS as an independent organization charged with safeguarding the embodiment of the National Socialist idea and translating the racism of the regime into a dynamic principle of action. The Reichsfhrer occupied a splendid villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Dahlem alongside other high Party officials, as well as a country home on the Tegernsee. However, neither location was suitable for the seat of his rising SS Order. His wandering eye fell upon Wewelsburg Castle, an impressive triple-towered renaissance-era citadel overlooking the Alme Valley ten miles southwest of Paderborn. The location and unusual triangular form of the castle, which had served as the secondary residence of the prince bishops of Paderborn in the early 1600s, was perfect for what Himmler had in mind. He viewed his black-shirted SS men as the reincarnation of not just the medieval order of the Teutonic knights, but also of King Arthurs Knights of the Round Table. Arthur had Camelot; Himmler would have Wewelsburg. The SS rented the castle in 1934 from the district of Bren for a single Reichsmark each year. Himmler intended to transform the castle into a nucleus of support for the pseudo-scientific ideology of National Socialism and a sacred shrine for dead SS leaders. Improvement work on the Wewelsburg complex began immediately. The castles focal point, a grand dining hall complete with a gigantic oak table that seated twelve, owed much to Arthurian legend. Coats of arms adorned the walls. Below the dining hall was a circular cellar called the Ring of Honor. The room, intended as a crypt, was lighted by a few rectangular openings in the thick brick walls and sported a giant swastika embedded in the ceiling. Signet rings emblazoned with the horrendous deaths head insignia were presented to the first 10,000 SS men and to senior commanders. Whenever an SS notable died, his ring was placed in a chest housed in the crypt. Select SS members were ordained into senior positions there.

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Each of the rooms allotted to the knights in the castle commemorated Germanic heroes, decorated and furnished in period and provided with books and documents on their subject. Himmlers castle quarters were dedicated to Heinrich I, the tenth-century Saxon King who beat back Magyar horsemen pressing westward from the interior of Russia and formed the basis of the German confederation of princes which became, under his son Otto, the Holy Roman Empire.5
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Reichsfhrer Himmler had successfully completed his bid to win control of the political and criminal police throughout the Third Reich when he became head of the Gestapo that had originally been established by Gring. Almost every level of power was now either under Himmlers command or within reach of his iron cold grasp. Now the only question was how that power would be wielded and the results that would flow from its use.

Chapter Notes

1. This general background of Heinrich Himmler is extracted from Peter Padfield, Himmler: ReichsFhrer-SS (London, Cassell Publishers, 2001). See specific references within. Padfields book is, by far, the best single source on Himmlers life and career under the Nazi banner. 2. Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of Nazi Leadership (London, 1970), pp. 141-144. 3. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, pp. 144-147. 4. Axelrod and Phillips, Dictionary of Military Biography, p. 166. 5. Padfield, Himmler, pp. 248-249.