Army of Evil: A History of the SS (7 page)

T
he most significant date in the early history of the SS was 20 January 1929,
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because that was when Heinrich Himmler, hitherto Heiden’s deputy, took over as National Leader of the tiny organisation. It would soon prove to be an appointment of enormous significance. At the time of his promotion, Himmler was only twenty-eight years old, but he was already a salaried activist within the NSDAP, enjoyed a growing reputation as an outstanding organiser, and had been instrumental in the party’s recent rise to prominence in southern German politics.

Unlike many of his contemporaries amongst the party’s “old fighters,” no great trauma led Himmler into the ranks of the NSDAP: he had not fought at the front during the war and his involvement in the early post-war power struggles had been minimal. Instead, it appears that he was attracted to the movement because it offered him an opportunity to identify with a class of men he greatly admired and was
desperate to join: soldiers. Himmler’s own background was comfortable and stolidly middle-class. His paternal grandfather, Johann Himmler, was born in 1809 in the Ansbach region of northern Bavaria, where he was raised by his mother. He trained as a weaver before leaving home at eighteen to join the Royal Bavarian Regiment, where he was noted for his brawling and “immoral behaviour with a low woman.”
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Later, he joined the Munich Police and then transferred into the Bavarian Police. At the age of fifty-three he became a
Gendarmerie Brigadier
(senior sergeant
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) in the district of Lindau, and around the same time he married Agathe Kiene, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a local watchmaker. Although of no special significance, Johann’s rise in social status—from illegitimate peasant, via military and police service, to government official and member of the middle classes—is curiously reminiscent of Hitler’s father’s ascent in Austria.

Johann and Agathe’s only son was born in Lindau in 1865 and christened Joseph Gebhard (although he was known by his second name). He was just seven years old when his father died, and Agathe struggled to make ends meet. However, as the son of a deceased civil servant, Gebhard had access to scholarships, and these, combined with his evident academic talent, ensured that he received a top-class education at a classical high school and then at the Royal Bavarian Maximilian University in Munich, where he read philosophy and later philology.
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He finished his studies in 1894 and became a teacher at a Munich high school as well as tutor to Prince Heinrich, the son of Prince Arnulf of Bavaria. Peter Padfield has suggested that Gebhard Himmler was “a member of the educated middle class, with the credentials to rise further in the social scale, and a powerful desire to do so.”
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Providing service to the Bavarian royal family was an excellent way to achieve this end.

In July 1897, Gebhard married Anna Heyder, a quiet, mousy Munich woman a year his junior, and they set up home in a comfortable apartment in the centre of the city. The following summer, their first son, also called Gebhard, was born. He was followed on 7 October
1900 by Heinrich Luitpold. He was given the name after Gebhard Senior had written to the sixteen-year-old Prince Heinrich to request permission to name his new son after his former pupil. This was duly granted, and the prince also agreed to be the baby’s godfather.

Heinrich Himmler’s childhood seems to have been happy and reasonably normal, given the circumstances (war broke out when he was thirteen). His father, by all accounts, was a pedantic and fussy man, but both he and Anna lavished a great deal of attention and affection on their sons (a third, Ernst, was born in 1905) and this was returned by all three boys. Professor Himmler would read them tales of the old Germans, accounts of famous battles and stories of their grandfather’s exploits as a soldier of fortune in Greece and elsewhere. Heinrich received his primary education at the Cathedral School in Munich and then, at the age of ten, followed his elder brother to the Royal Wilhelm High School. Former classmates recalled him being at or near the top of the class in all of the academic subjects. The only area where he was lacking was in sport and physical education. One former classmate described him as: “of scarcely average size, but downright plump, with an uncommonly milk-white complexion, fairly short hair, and already wearing gold-rimmed glasses on his rather sharp nose; not infrequently he showed a half embarrassed, half sardonic smile either to excuse his short-sightedness or to stress a certain superiority.”
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He suffered a number of illnesses, and his health was never particularly robust. The plumpness can be explained by his great love of cakes and sweets. Consequently, PE became a terror to him, not least because the gym instructor sometimes dealt with him harshly.

In 1913, Professor Himmler was appointed deputy headmaster at the high school in Landshut, north-east of Munich. Once the family had relocated there, they lived in a comfortable house in the old town. Young Gebhard and Heinrich were both enrolled in their father’s new school, and Heinrich formed a great friendship with another boy who had moved there from Munich, Falk Zipperer.

The family were on holiday in Titmoning near the Austrian border
when war broke out between Austria and Serbia on 29 July 1914. Heinrich, a young boy brought up on tales of martial glory, was intensely excited by this development. Since the age of ten, at the instigation of his father, he had been keeping a diary, and now he recorded his thoughts on the war. Naturally, he was fully in support of it, and frequently he revealed his contempt for those who were not: “Whenever there is talk of our troops retreating, they wet themselves.”
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He played games of war with his friend Zipperer, and expressed his longing to prove himself as a soldier.

Before long, he joined a youth cadet force—the
Jugendwehr
—for pre-military training, and began a programme of exercises to toughen himself up. But his family life continued largely as before. Then, in 1916, his elder brother left school to begin officer training, and in 1917 Zipperer did the same. Professor Himmler was keen that Heinrich should finish his schooling and gain his leaving certificate, but Heinrich prevailed on him to pull some strings (via the Bavarian royal family) and at Christmas 1917 he received orders to report at the start of January to the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment to begin his training as a
Fahnenjunker
(officer cadet). This would eventually qualify him as an officer of the reserve.

Much has been made of Himmler’s “failure” as a soldier, but in reality he was no such thing. Although he suffered from homesickness during his first few weeks in the army, he was an entirely satisfactory recruit. He did his basic infantry training in Regensburg between January and June 1918; officer training between June and September; and a machine-gun course in September and October.
⁷
Had the war continued, he would have joined his regiment at the front and, in due course, would almost certainly have been commissioned. However, once the armistice was declared, there was no point in his leaving Regensburg. Once the regiment returned, he learned that he and his fellow cadets were to be demobilised, which duly happened shortly before Christmas 1918.

There is no doubt that Himmler was bitterly disappointed that he
did not get to serve as a frontline soldier and earn his commission—later in life, he would lie that he had done both—but his “failure” was merely due to his age, not to any inadequacy or lack of ability. At this point, poised on the brink of manhood, achieving officer’s rank was the summit of his ambition, and he clung to the hope that he might be able to resume his military training at some stage.
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He would be disappointed in that, too, but it is worth considering the degree to which he developed during his relatively short military period. Before joining the army, he had essentially been a spoiled, fussy, naïve, middle-class mother’s boy who had rarely been outside the bosom of his family. In the first few months of his military service, his letters home contained endless requests for sweets and cakes to supplement his rations. However, as time went by, he toughened up and grew to enjoy the disciplined routine. He never shook off the pedantry that he inherited from his father, but by the time he was demobilised he was considerably more independent, was starting to formulate his own opinions and was finding his own path through the world. He had been forced to rely for the first time on his own instincts and intellect, and he had thrived. He was probably physically tougher, too. Above all, though, military service increased Himmler’s self-confidence. He would have gained experience in commanding and leading soldiers, even at the very basic, cadet level. The effect of such experience is considerable: military leadership carries with it the obligation to balance the needs of subordinates against the requirements of the hierarchy; to understand basic operational, logistical and administrative planning; and to act decisively when required. Himmler surely developed at least some of these attributes.

However, with a military career snatched away from him, Himmler returned to education. He had missed a year of school, so in early 1919 he returned to Landshut High School to take a special course for ex-servicemen—led by his father—which would take him through the last two years of secondary schooling in just two terms. However, this was interrupted in April by political events as the Free Corps mobilised
to suppress the revolutionary government in Munich. Himmler first joined a small Free Corps unit in Landshut and subsequently the reserve company of the
Oberland
Free Corps, in which he served as an adjutant to the commander. But neither group was needed by the regular army forces and they remained in reserve. Around this time, there was some speculation that the
Oberland
might be absorbed into the regular army, but it was disbanded instead, and Himmler returned to his studies.

His second choice for a career after the army was agriculture. In the summer of 1919, Professor Himmler was appointed headmaster of the high school at Ingolstadt, and he arranged for Heinrich to spend a year working on a nearby farm, in preparation for an agronomy course at the
Technische Hochschule
(Technical University) in Munich. He began work on the farm on 1 August, in time for the harvest, and Peter Padfield remarks: “The work was hard and it must have been especially so for Himmler after the desk-work at school.”
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Possibly, although it is important not to confuse the current ex-soldier with the adolescent mother’s boy. Nevertheless, little more than a month after he started, he was hospitalised after catching paratyphus and was then under doctor’s orders to study rather than remain on the farm. Consequently, in October, he moved into a rented room in Munich and began his course at the university.

What followed was probably as formative for Himmler as his year in the army. As in everything else he did, he applied himself to student life assiduously: he fell in (unrequited) love; he joined a duelling fraternity; and overall he was “friendly, helpful, studious and something of a bore.”
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Politically, his views were unremarkable: he adopted the conservative nationalism of the Munich bourgeoisie and appears to have been no more than conventionally anti-Semitic: there were no Jews in his social circle at this time and as a typical middle-class Catholic he regarded them as “aliens,” but his diaries betray no trace of his later ferocious hatred.
¹¹

A year of academic study was followed by his deferred year of practical
study on another farm. This time he found a place at Fridolfing, near the Austrian border, and he seems to have been far happier here than he was at Ingolstadt. The farmer and his wife treated him as a member of their family and he appears to have had plenty of free time, during which he read widely in politics, history and literature, often transcribing passages from books that appealed to him.

Throughout his three years as a student, Himmler kept in touch with the military. In November 1919, he and his brother Gebhard had joined the 14th Alarm Company of the Munich Protection Brigade, an official army reserve unit. When this was disbanded at Allied insistence in the spring of 1920, he enrolled as a member of the Munich Citizens’ Militia, a semi-official group that was sponsored and equipped by the army. Joining these groups put him in touch with some of the radicalised army officers who were prominent in political circles within Munich. He eventually became a
Fähnrich
(senior officer cadet—in effect, a cadet NCO), which was just one step away from being a commissioned officer.

In the autumn of 1921, Himmler returned to Munich for the final year of his academic studies. It was around this time that he first met Ernst Röhm. In his diary entry for 26 January 1922, Himmler noted that he had encountered Röhm as well as his former company commander at a meeting at the Arzberger Keller in Munich. But the tone of the entry—“Captain Röhm and Major Angerer were there; both very friendly. Röhm pessimistic about bolshevism”
^12—
suggests that he knew him, or at least of him, before this meeting. Himmler admired and respected Röhm as a decorated frontline soldier, despite the latter’s open homosexuality.

Himmler passed his final exams in August 1922 and quickly found a job as an agricultural assistant at a fertiliser factory in Schleissheim. At Röhm’s suggestion, he also joined an unofficial nationalist paramilitary group called the
Reichsflagge
(Imperial Flag), with which he did more military training. By now, he was more radical in his views, which was hardly surprising, given that he associated almost exclusively
with right-wing ex-servicemen. In the year he worked at Schleissheim he became increasingly convinced that Germany’s republican constitution needed to be replaced, perhaps by force. This was the year of hyperinflation, an economic catastrophe that weighed particularly heavily on financially prudent, middle-class families like
¹²
his own. Furthermore, he was already nationalistic and martial in outlook, so Röhm must have had little trouble persuading his young friend to join the NSDAP, which Himmler did on 1 August 1923. He became party member 14,303.
¹³