ON JUNE 26, 1919 Himmler’s father had become headmaster of the Gymnasium in Ingolstadt. For a few weeks Heini worked on a farm at Oberhaunstadt nearby. A work diary started on August 1 shows him toiling in stables, fields, and the dairy. On August 15 he entered, ‘Stables as usual. Church in the morning, with Mr Franz after lunch.’
On September 2 he fell ill with salmonella poisoning, and he remained bedridden for the rest of the month. On the twenty-fourth a doctor in Munich diagnosed an enlarged heart, and advised him to quit farm work for a year and concentrate on studies. Himmler transferred from rural Bavaria to Munich. He applied to study at the Polytechnic and paid the requisite fees. At the same time his brother Gebhard engaged to read mechanical engineering. The four storeyed building sat with its square, copper-sheathed clocktower between Gabelsberger Strasse and Theresien Strasse. The Polytechnic’s file records them as living just two blocks away from the college at No. 5, Schelling Strasse, a street much trodden later in history.
The Polytechnic issued a matriculation certificate on October 18, 1919. Heini would study here until 1922. He had chosen to read agriculture, and he might well have prospered as a farmer; farmers seldom go hungry. The two brothers would share digs, and take their weekly bath at the Luisenbad (at home they had only an old-fashioned bath contraption). ‘Our room looks very comfortable right now,’ he wrote to his parents a few days later. ‘I just wish you could see it. Everything excellently in its rightful place. In the mornings we drink tea, which is very good. We get up at six-thirty. Then we tot up our outgoings of the day before and reconcile them’ – this no doubt for their father’s benefit. ‘For the morning break we always buy cheese.’
His mother did the laundry for them both. The parents still required him to practise the piano, and he struggled with the keys until they conceded defeat. He went back to Ingolstadt frequently, and took Thilde their old nanny from Sendling, the Munich suburb where she lived, to the Waldfriedhof to see one grandmother’s grave and then a day later with Gebhard to the southern cemetery to visit their other’s.
Like freshers everywhere, Heini signed up for everything – the Polytechnic union, an old boys’ society, a breeding association, a gun club, the local Alpine society, and the officers’ association of the 11th Infantry Regiment. The return to Munich, his big native city, also brought Heini together with Mariele, the sister of Ludwig Zahler, a former comrade during his military training at Regensburg; Ludwig was Heini’s second cousin, and became his best friend at the Poly.
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David Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.