Roger Manvell - Heinrich Himmler

On 27 April, Schellenberg received a message that sent him hurrying to meet Bernadotte at Odense airport in Jutland, where he arrived late because of the bad weather; he had gathered in any case that Himmler’s proposals had not been well received in Britain and America, but had decided not to pass this on in case Himmler might relapse once again into faint-heartedness. Bernadotte offered to drive with him to Lübeck to see the Reichsführer. As soon as Himmler heard that his offer had not been eagerly received, he ordered Schellenberg to report to him. With all his subtle plans in a state of collapse, Schellenberg drove south in fear of his life. He took the strange precaution of telephoning Hamburg and arranging to take the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff with him to this dangerous interview. It always calmed Himmler to have his horoscope read.

But it needed more than an astrologer to know what the fates were preparing for Himmler on the other side of the world. The story of the leak to the international press of Himmler’s discussions with Count Bernadotte has only recently been told in a detailed statement by Jack Winocaur, at that time director of the British Information Services in Washington. 7Winocaur was on the staff attending the three-month session of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, starting in April 1945 at San Francisco. The British delegation included Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary, who at a private delegation meeting on 27 April is reported by Winocaur to have said quite casually: ‘By the way … we’ve heard from Stockholm that Himmler has made an offer through Bernadotte to surrender Germany unconditionally to the Americans and ourselves. Of course, we are letting the Russians know about it.’ The British and American Ministers in Washington had reported the offer during the early hours of 25 April to Churchill and Truman, both of whom regarded it as an attempt by Germany to split the Allies, and they arranged at once for Stalin to be informed. A reply was sent that surrender could only be acceptable if it were offered to all the Allies simultaneously.

Winocaur, who was one of the men in charge of British press relations at the conference, knew nothing of this background at the time, but felt that Eden’s momentous statement to the delegates should be passed on to the press. After some hesitation, entirely on his own initiative, he gave the news overnight to his friend Paul Scott Rankine of Reuters on the strict understanding that the source should not be revealed. Rankine sent a press cable to London breaking the news in an exclusive statement soon after one o’clock in the morning of 28 April.

While Schellenberg was during the morning of 28 April successfully calming Himmler with the aid of his favourite astrologer, the Allied press was pouring out the news of the Reichsführer’s independent attempt at negotiations. Completely unaware of this, Himmler attended a military conference in Rheinsberg convened by Keitel. At this meeting Himmler presided, which showed that he regarded himself as Hitler’s deputy and successor.

In the late afternoon Bernadotte heard the news of the negotiations on the clandestine radio, and realized that Himmler was finished as a negotiator. Doenitz also heard the report and telephoned enquiries to Himmler, who immediately denied the story as it had been put in the broadcast, but added that he had no intention of issuing any public statement himself. According to Schellenberg, he then spent part of the day deciding how best to order the evacuation of German troops from Norway and Denmark.

It was not until nine o‘clock that night that a monitor report on a broadcast put out by the B.B.C. gave Himmler away to the Führer in the bowels of the Bunker. According to one observer, Hitler’s ‘colour rose to a heated red, and his face became virtually unrecognizable’. 8Then he began to rage at this treacherous betrayal by the man he had trusted most of all. The men and women hemmed in the Bunker were convulsed with emotion, and ‘everyone looked to his poison’. Himmler’s arrest was ordered; he followed Goring into the limbo of the dispossessed. ‘A traitor must never succeed as Führer’, screamed Hitler. 9He took his revenge on the only associate of Himmler he had in his power. This was Fegelein, the brother-in-law of the woman he was about to marry and Himmler’s unfaithful subordinate at Hitler’s headquarters. He had tried to desert, but he was dragged back, taken upstairs into the Chancellery garden and shot around midnight on the barest suspicion that he had known something of Himmler’s treachery.

Hitler ordered Göring’s successor as head of the Luftwaffe, Field-Marshal von Greim, to leave the Bunker and fly during the night under Russian fire to Doenitz’s headquarters, which were now at Ploen. Greim, who had been wounded in the foot during his hazardous flight into Berlin in a light aircraft, flew north in the same ’plane piloted by Hanna Reitsch, who was a dedicated Nazi. They took off from the avenue leading up to the Brandenburg Gate. This strange pair did not arrive at Ploen, which was on the Baltic coast some 200 miles north-west of Berlin, until the afternoon of 29 April, having landed in the early hours of the morning at Rechlin.

At Ploen they found an uneasy balance of power in force between Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the northern armies, and Himmler, Commander of the S.S. and the police. According to Schwerin von Krosigk, Doenitz and Himmler had talked the matter over and agreed that each of them was ready to serve under the Führer’s acknowledged successor. Doenitz imagined this must be Himmler, and so, for that matter, did the Reichsführer himself.

During 29 April no official statement reached Doenitz that Himmler had been dispossessed of his rank and power by Hitler, although an ambiguous signal arrived from Bormann at 3.15 on the morning of 30 April: Doenitz was to ‘proceed at once and mercilessly against all traitors’. Only Greim had received a definite instruction to arrest Himmler, an order which he was powerless to carry out unaided by Doenitz, who was still certain Himmler would at any moment become his Führer. There is no record of when Greim met Doenitz or what exactly he said to him. Neither of them knew that Hitler’s testament was already composed and signed, or that Doenitz was to be appointed Führer with Karl Hanke, Gauleiter of Breslau, as Reichsführer S.S. and Paul Giesler, Gauleiter of Munich, as Minister of the Interior.

The isolation of Hitler in Berlin was now complete. His final craving for vengeance against Goring and Himmler, the men who had served him in their own way for the best part of two decades, was frustrated by the confusion that surrounded the last days of his life. While Goring was kept in nominal confinement in the south by an embarrassed unit of S.S. men, Himmler remained free in the north, a political buccaneer who did not even know until after Hitler’s death that his authority had been swept from beneath his feet. With his remaining staff, his escort of S.S. men, and his fleet of cars, he moved in uneasy orbit round the Grand Admiral’s headquarters at Ploen with no particular duties to occupy his time except the maintenance of his position and the salvage of his power. 10It was not until late in the afternoon of 30 April that Doenitz learned in a signal sent by Bormann from the Bunker in Berlin of his unwanted elevation to Führer of a Germany on the verge of disintegration. Bormann’s signal was worded evasively and did not even reveal that Hitler had died by his own hand at 3.30 that afternoon: Doenitz merely knew that he, and not Himmler, had been nominated Hitler’s successor: ‘In place of the former Reich Marshal Goring the Führer appoints you, Herr Grand Admiral, as his successor. Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation requires.’