Roger Manvell - Heinrich Himmler

18

Werwolf, the so-called German resistance movement against the Allies, was largely a propaganda device prepared by Goebbels and Himmler.

19

See The S.S., p. 381.

20

According to von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende (Vol. II, p. 161) Goebbels proposed to Hitler that Himmler should be made officially Minister of War.

21

For quotations, see The Bormann Letters.

22

Fegelein and Burgdorff, these men with whom Bormann seems so friendly, have their modest place in history. Fegelein, Himmler’s uncertain representative at Hitler’s headquarters, was married to Eva Braun’s sister, but nevertheless was executed by Hitler for desertion during the last days of the war. Burgdorff’s claims to distinction include the sinister fact that it was he who handed Rommel the poison with which he was required to kill himself.

23

See Westphal, The German Army in the West, p. 172.

24

Westphal, op. cit., p. 188.

25

Guderian, op. cit., p. 403.

26

An interesting picture of Himmler as commander-in-the-field is given by the well-known German journalist, Jürgen Thorwald, in his two books, one on the Vistula campaign, Es begann an der Weichsel, and the other on the Elbe campaign, Das Ende an der Elbe.

27

man synthetic oil industry had suffered severely from Allied bombing. Hitler believed that at all costs he must preserve the Austrian and Hungarian oil wells which were still in his hands.

28

Guderian, op. cit., p. 413.

29

See The S.S., p. 406.

30

See Guderian, op. cit., p. 422.

31

Count Bernadotte, in The Fall of the Curtain, a book largely ghost-written by Schellenberg who took refuge with him after the collapse of Germany, deleted all Schellenberg’s references to Kersten. Nor are there any references to the work of the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Günther, who had planned the negotiations which Kersten so resolutely carried through with Himmler. See the attack on Bernadotte’s attitude to Kersten made by Trevor-Roper in his Introduction to The Kersten Memoirs . Dr de Jong, director of the Rijksinstituut in Amsterdam and a distinguished historian, who knew Kersten personally, assures us that while Kersten undoubtedly did good, he was a man of great vanity who tended to exaggerate his influence, an example being his claim that he practically saved the entire Dutch nation from evacuation to the East. Kersten and Bernadotte were unable to tolerate each other.

32

See Semmler, Goebbels, the Man next to Hitler, pp. 178-9.

33

In The Fall of the Curtain, the date of the final meeting with Himmler is given on p. 41 as 12 February. This is plainly an oversight, since on page 20 Bernadotte states he flew to Berlin on 16 February. Schellenberg states (p. 435) that he took Bernadotte to see Himmler two days after the meeting with Kaltenbrunner. In The Last Days of Hitler, Prof. Trevor-Roper wrongly accepts 12 February as the date of the meeting, and Reitlinger variously gives it as 17 February in The Final Solution, p. 462 and 18 February in The S.S., p. 415.

34

See The S.S., p. 414. The source is von Oven, op. cit. II, pp. 252-4.

35

See Prof Trevor-Roper’s Introduction to Kersten Memoirs , pp. 15-16, and The S.S., p. 416.

36

See Thorwald, Das Ende an der Elbe, p. 25, and The S.S., p. 413.

37

See I.M.T. XIV, p. 374, and The Final Solution, p. 446.

38

Quoted by Shulman, Defeat in the West , p. 280.

39

During the course of this talk, Count Schwerin-Krosigk said that he felt the only justification for the sacrifices which Hitler had imposed on the German people would be to break the alliance between the Western Allies and the Russians. Himmler agreed and, according to Schwerin-Krosigk, openly admitted that great mistakes had been made. As for the Jews, they had now become very important as ‘barter in all future negotiations’. Himmler was not prepared to say anything disloyal about Hitler; he merely said that ‘the Führer had a different conception’. Speaking of himself, Himmler added that ‘while his reputation was that of a gay and godless person, in the depths of his heart he was really a believer in Providence and in God’. It was God who had spared the Führer on 20 July last; it was God who had brought a thaw to the frozen waters of the Oder and delayed the Russian crossing at the moment when he had been in despair about the collapse of their defence; it was God who had taken Roosevelt’s life at the very moment when the Russians were closing in on Berlin. (See Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 197 et seq.)

Frau Heydrich has given us a striking picture of Himmler at the turn of the years 1944-5. She was still living in the castle near Prague, but by now she was sheltering many refugee German women and their children from East Prussia, all of them connected in one way or another with the S.S. Himmler visited her unannounced some time after she had written to him for advice on what she should do. He was evasive, as usual, about the situation, and referred vaguely to Hitler’s miracle weapons ( Wunderwaffen ) . When he stroked her son’s blond hair and said with a sigh, ‘Ach, Heider’, she sensed there was nothing to be done but resign herself to her fate. When she spoke to him about the problems of evacuation, all he said was that there were plenty of edible mushrooms in Bavaria. He shook hands with the women at her request, and after he had gone (it was the last time she was to see him), Frau Heydrich organized the evacuation of her household and the refugees in three lorries.

In this chapter we are specially indebted to Colonel Michael Murphy and Captain Tom Selvester, the British officers who had charge of Himmler, to Josef Kiermaier, Himmler’s bodyguard, and to Dr Werner Best, for the special evidence they have given us concerning the last days of Himmler’s life.

1

‘Let bygones be bygones’, he is reported to have said to Masur.

2

Kersten Memoirs , p. 288.

3

Kersten managed to get a flight from Tempelhof to Copenhagen the following day, 22 April; after this he travelled surface to Stockholm and reported to Günther on the evening of 23 April.

4

The account of this meeting between Himmler and Bernadotte is taken primarily from Bernadotte’s own account in The Fall of the Curtain.

5

Himmler was so pre-occupied that, according to Bernadotte, he drove his car straight into some barbed wire. He frequently preferred to drive himself rather than be driven, even during these last days of strain.

6

For the various opinions on Himmler’s claim to the succession, see Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 101, 182-3; Semmler, op. cit., p. 178, Alan Bullock, Hitler, pp. 705, 709, and, for Schwerin-Krosigk, Shirer’s End of a Berlin Diary, p. 203.

7

This statement by Winocaur was published for the first time in 1963 in Amateur Agent, by Ewan Butler. Ewan Butler also tells the story (pp. 157 et seq.) of the forged German stamps printed in London and valued at 20 pfennigs; they bore the effigy of Himmler instead of Hitler, and agents were instructed to put them into use in Germany during the last months of the war. American collectors after the war were offering $10,000 for cancelled copies of these stamps. Ewan Butler himself ‘borrowed’ through an agent 150 pages of typescript of Schellenberg’s diary, items for which he posted daily from Germany for safe-keeping in Sweden. The sheets were microfilmed, and Butler translated the diary for the Foreign Office in London. (See pp. 182—3).