Category: Heinrich Himmler

THE PLEASURES WHICH MADE those evenings ‘unforgettable’ also helped young Heinrich Himmler overcome his tendency to adolescent depression . ‘First of all Maja sang, “A Woman’s Love and Sorrow.” She sang the verses with tears in her eyes. I don’t think Ludwig understands her, his Golden girl, but I can’t be sure of that. I just don’t get him. Later Gebhard and Kathe played the piano.’ Kathe Loritz – also Maja – was Ludwig Zahler’s girl, and later his wife. ‘Ludwig and I shared an armchair. Marielle [Lacher] and Maja sat on the floor clinging to us both. We all cuddled, partly in love and partly in a fraternal embrace. It was an evening I won’t easily forget.’

He felt sorry for poor Maja, he wrote on November 5, 1919; and two days later there was more of the same: then he sermonized to a hidden congregation in his diary, ‘Yes, it’s true: Mankind is a wretched creature. Restless is the heart, until it rests with Thee, 0 Lord [see my comment in the comments section - Editor]. How powerless are we, we can’t help it. I can but be a friend to my friends, do my duty, work, struggle with myself, and never allow myself to lose control.’ After just a month living among educated youngsters like himself, he was beginning to question everything. Louisa no longer excited him. On Sunday morning he went to the cathedral for Mass and the sermon, and then over to her family, the Hagers: ‘Louisa was nice enough, but not the way I like.’ He spent a cheerful evening after that with Maja’s family. ‘Today I have by and large regained my spiritual balance. God will help me forwards.’

Thus as he plunged into the world of agriculture an inner turmoil began, between the strict religious doctrines impressed upon him by his parents, and the unfamiliar chemistry of student life and adolescence. ‘I work,’ he wrote on November 11, i919, ‘because it is my duty, because I find peace in work; and I work for my Germanic ideal of womanhood with whom I shall one day live my life and fight my battles as a German in the East, far from my beloved Germany.’ One evening a hypnotist came round to the Loritz household and tried his black art on them. ‘I summoned up all my powers of resistance,’ boasted Heini. ‘Obviously it did not work with me. But it did totally with poor little Maja. I felt so sorry for her when I saw her go under. I could have strangled the dog in cold blood. I worked against him where I could. . . His mind-reading was very good, but I think anybody capable of concentrating could do it with sufficient practice. I instinctively disliked the fellow, I hate this whole swindle; it only comes off if you go along with him.’

He loved Maja’s eagerness to help; she made a fair-copy in twenty pages of neat handwriting for him of his zoology paper, and repeated the drawings with great care. A day or two later he helped her with her math, and ‘she thanked me very much – (he drew a careful line, and did that again the next day). His heart in a whirl, zerwühlt, he wrote that Friday evening: ‘Then over to the Loritz’s for a meal. Maja was very nice – and there was the line again. (Those who research in private diaries know not to ignore such signs.)

He was still acquiring social graces. That included taking lessons in ballroom dancing, which he loathed as only a nineteen-year-old can. ‘Diary, November 15, 1919: From eight to ten at dancing-class.’ – and here he inserted three [iron] crosses. ‘All beginnings are hard,’ he added, using a German aphorism, ‘but I’ll get the hang of it. Dance classes seem pretty pointless to me, and just a waste of time.’ ‘What a disgusting fraud it all is,’ he commented. ‘But I’ll be glad once I’ve learned to do it, and I can dance with whoever takes my fancy.’ ‘If I could only look danger squarely in the eye,’ he added in one entry, ‘risk my life somewhere, fight, that would be a real liberation for me.’

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

THERE WAS ONE OVERHANGING PROBLEM, the growing left-wing unrest in Bavaria. The army might soon have him doing night patrols as a reservist. ‘Dear Mother, Dear Father,’ he wrote on November 6, 1919. ‘Today you get your promised letter. Thanks a lot for your dear packages. The one with coat and fur jumpers arrived this morning. Gebhard collected the other at the post office this afternoon. Again, dear Mother, thanks a lot. After all, your boys are a bothersome pair. The possibility exists that they will call us up in a few days’ time…’

After adding a breakdown of their expenses, he asked for more cash. ‘Then Mother, we would like to for the following with our next laundry parcel (but there is absolutely no hurry): 1. smokes for Gebhard, 2. a little green cover for the travelling suitcase, 3. wax paper to wrap sandwiches, 4. Gebhard’s electric flashlight, 5….’ Such letters are hard to paraphrase, but they provide much we need to know about Heinrich Himmler at this time.

After his recovery from illness he went to confession twice: he found himself thinking impure thoughts about women. He had begun cautious friendships – primarily with Ludwig’s girl, Maja Loritz and also with Louisa Hager, the daughter of trusted family friends; her mother evidently approved, as the two females came round and joshed him. ‘Friendship? Love?’ pondered Himmler in his diary. ‘Another step towards maturity. But I will stay indifferent.’

‘Then over to the Hagers for lunch,’ he confided on October 20, 1919, the day he registered at the Polytechnic: ‘Mama Hager was as nice and kind to me as ever. Afterwards we talk about private dancing lessons.’ Louisa resorted to tears, every woman’s last resort. ‘Floods of tears from the poor thing. I felt really sorry for her. She does not realise how pretty she is when she cries. I escorted her to the streetcar, then went to the State Library and read up on the war of 1812. From four to five o’clock I sat in on a lecture at the Veterinary School.’ Louisa went to Communion every day, and she shot up in his esteem. ‘This really was the best thing I have heard this last week.’ Most evenings after lectures, which began on November 3, the four friends went to concerts or an indoor swimming pool. Heini found it difficult to juggle these two females, Maja and Louisa. With Maja he visited the theatre and talked about religion; he wrote rapturously, ‘I think I’ve found a sister.’ Less innocently perhaps, he was thrilled that she hooked her arm in his, as they went for a stroll with Gebhard and his girl. But Heini was plagued with irritation about Louisa – and twice he lamented in his pages, ‘She won’t let her hair down.’

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

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.

THE TIDE OF WAR receding across Europe had left behind ugly whirlpools; Bavaria was in permanent unrest. Communists, socialists, regular army, and Free Corps disputed control, always keenly watched by the central government in Berlin.

The example of Hungary had struck terror into Munich’s middle classes: in Budapest Bela Kun, a Transylvanian Communist (born Bela Cohn) seized power. In Munich, the turmoil continued after the killing of Kurt Eisner: a triumvirate of ‘Russian’ Jews under the St Petersburg-born Communist Evgenii Levine, seized power on April 6, 1919, and proclaimed a ‘Soviet Republic.’ Levine had agitated among his fellow soldiers for an Allied victory – using an argument identical to that of Hans Oster and future traitors. ‘It is necessary,’ Levine said, ‘that Germany is humiliated: that the colonial troops of France and England march through the Brandenburg Gate.’

Himmler’s diaries and letters still make no mention of Jews but the backdrop to later events was already forming. The German government in Berlin, under socialist chancellor Friedrich Ebert, ordered the truncated army to crush the ‘Soviet Republic’ of Bavaria. Aided by the Free Corps and a substantial Bavarian army contingent under Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp it was bloodily suppressed, but not before Levine’s men took scores of middle-class burghers hostage, along with members of the right-wing Thule Society, and locked them away in the Luitpold Gymnasium building. These hostages were taken out two at a time, and bludgeoned and shot to death on the last night of April 1919. Levine’s accomplices were shot out of hand (except for Tovia Axelrod, who claimed Russian diplomatic status). Levine was executed by firing squad at Munich’s Stadelheim prison on July 9, of which we shall occasionally hear more.

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Irving’s book can be purchased on his website.

Previous True Himmler entries: 0, 1, 2, 3.

 

Gaudeamus Igitur [‘So Let Us Rejoice’]

HE SITS IN THE TRAIN brooding, a few days after his nineteenth birthday in October 1919. There is a young couple seated opposite. He noticed them earlier, on the railroad platform; they are married, and he envies them. He is visiting Eichstatt, a town popular with pilgrims. It has a castle, built by mediaeval princes and clergy—‘impossible with today’s wages and workforce,’ reflects Heinrich Himmler, the teenager. Twenty or more years from now he will command a slave-labour force of millions building much vaster structures.

He has brought along something to read, Friedrich Schiller’s 1784 pamphlet on ‘The Stage as a Moral Institution’—a call for playwrights to purify the German language; both are disciplines after his father’s heart, and the Classics professor may well have pressed this reading matter into his hands. Lingering on rather lower ground, Heini has brought along a ghost story, The White Hand, to read as well.

He and Gebhard are visiting castles and monasteries and family—rattling along on the narrow-gauge railroad to Rebhard-Hofmühle station, and then on to the majestic church at Eichstatt, where their uncle Karl Patin has been a priest since 1894 in the famous abbey of St Walburg’s, named after an English Benedictine missionary whose bones rest here for over twelve hundred years. Uncle Karl is just back from officiating at a funeral, and he invites them in for tea.

Heinrich Himmler is still getting to know his family in October 1919 as he prepares for his years of higher education: men of the cloth and Classical academics, that is his milieu.

 
Editor’s Note: Below, excerpts from the third chapter, ‘A Witch in the Family’, of David Irving’s book on Heinrich Himmler (available through Irving’s bookstore here).
 

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Himmler’s missing 1940 diary appeared on the auction block in Munich in 2006; we were languishing that year in a Vienna prison cell, convicted of ‘reviving the Nazi Party’ through views expressed sixteen years earlier. The original is now deposited under glass, like a rare poisonous beetle, in the museum of a medieval castle called Wewelsburg, of which we shall eventually hear more. We know that Professor Michael Wildt worked on Himmler’s 1937 diary in Moscow, and we obtained copies of the 1941 and 1942 diaries from the NA and the same archives.

There is one other trove to be mentioned: the papers of Himmler’s wife and daughter. Years ago, an Englishman won them at an auction in New York. Chaim Rosenthal, a crooked cultural attaché at the Israeli consulate, offered to the naïve Englishman to convey these to the U.K., but hastened back to Tel Aviv instead. He donated them to Tel Aviv university. Upon realising that they were twice-stolen property, the Israeli university quiet properly returned them, though to Rosenthal and not their rightful owner.

* * *

Not every child is blessed to have a school headmaster as a father, although Heinrich Himmler may not have considered it good fortune at the time. Heinrich had been born into such a teacher’s family in Munich, just two hundred and eighty days into the Twentieth Century upon which he was to leave such an indelible mark; some of his ill-starred contemporaries including Hans Frank and Martin Bormann were also born in 1900…

Their ancestral line stretched back over the centuries, its nodes and gridlines populated by a motley cast of businessmen, gendarmes, and schoolmasters. Heini’s own experts would trace them back to before Charlemagne. One of Heini’s female ancestors named Passanquay had been burned at the stake as a witch. Reinhard Heydrich would derive satisfaction from informing him in May 1939 of another unfortunate, Margareth Himbler, of Markelsheim, burned as a witch on Apr 4, 1629…

Having retired at sixty-five with the venerable rank of Geheimrat, or privy counsellor, the professor would die on October 29, 1936, before Heini’s fame had turned to infamy. His wife, Frau Geheimrat Anna, was remembered as a gentle little woman, a churchgoer. ‘She could not have hurt a fly,’ said one who knew her. They had been living on the second floor of No. 6, Hildegard Strasse, when she produced Heini, their second boy, on October 7, 1900… A few months later, in March 1901, they moved to a new apartment above a pharmacy in Liebig Strasse, in a genteel area of Munich.

A tall carved statue of Christ stood in the entrance hall—an heirloom left to their mother, and the boys crossed themselves each time before it, just as their parents did. Heini set up an Ahnen-Zimmer, an ancestral shrine, where he spent hours studying his ancestors… The photos show him already wearing the round-eyed glasses which were to become iconic later in his life.

He made many friends at the Gymnasium. One was Wolfgang Hallgarten, three months his junior and son of a New York Jew (but raised as a Lutheran). Heini occasionally visited their home; the boys’ governess Luise Essert discovered his passion for hot chocolate. It was a wealthy, enlightened household. Thomas Mann and Bruno Walter the conductor were among other guests, and the young physicist Werner Heisenberg played his cello within its walls. ‘We knew him from 1910 to 1913,’ wrote Hallgarten of Heinrich Himmler, rising rather notably to his defence in the 1950s, ‘the years when we were all students at the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich’… ‘I for my part failed to discover the slightest anti-Semitic streak in him’, reminisced Hallgarten, referring to those shared childhood years at school. For many years he assumed that the fearsome Himmler that people spoke about was a brother, and not the boy he had known…

An older brother, named Gebhard like their father, had been born toward the end of the century which the world had left behind—on July 29, 1898 to be precise. A third son, little Ernst Hermann Himmler, arrived five years after Heini. He was born two days before Christmas in 1905. ‘Ernstl,’ as they called him, married Paula during World War Two, and would disappear on its last day, killed in action. Ernst had joined the Volkssturm, Germany’s ‘Home Guard,’ and when the Soviet Army attacked Berlin’s Charlottenburg district he went out, rifle in hand, to defend the Radio building with the rest of his staff and was not seen again…

‘If my parents’ house was an extraordinarily liberal, free, quiet one,’ recalled Karl, on trial for his life half a century later, ‘then the Himmler house was that of a strong orthodox Catholic schoolmaster, whose son was brought up strictly and kept very short of cash.’ Karl Gebhardt would accompany Heini throughout his life…

The Himmlers were a church-going family. They prayed together, and stayed together. His parent’s influence remained overbearing. Heinrich was received into the Catholic church on April 1, 1911; he placed in his private papers a printed ‘First Communion’ certificate based on a painting of Christ at the Last Supper; he went frequently to Mass and received Holy Communion kneeling at his father’s side, he celebrated his own family name-days and those of the Bavarian royal family. When Gebhard fell dangerously ill with pleurisy in 1914, they promised a pilgrimage to Burghausen and a special Mass if he recovered, and they kept their promise. Heini went to church every morning, and mentioned each visit in the diary in case the Lord had not caught sight of this little lamb attending His House…

This was not without its effect on the impressionable youngster. How he envied Gebhard when he turned on July 29 and signed up for the Landsturm, the reserve: ‘O, to be out there with the rest of them!’—meaning the fighting front. Instead he stayed behind, teaching Ernstl to swim, and went for walks to more churches and monasteries with his pious mother. Once they climbed up to see the church atop the Marienburg; Heini counted the steps on the way down, to where in 1143 a Cistercian monastery had been founded: 265 steps, he found. He entered the number in his diary…

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Young Heini applied for a commission in the navy, we are told, but the navy turned him down, because of his poor eyesight… As Germany’s war fortunes declined, the request was refused. Heini left school on October 8, 1917 and began training as a Fahnenjunker with the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment ‘Von der Tann’ in Regensburg. He formally entered military service on January 2, 1918. Still of indifferent physique, he found the training demanding…

With the war over… his godfather Prince Heinrich had been killed in action. In Bavaria the Communists had seized power, overthrown the Wittelsbach monarchy, and established a republic under the Jew Kurt Kamonowsky, better known as Kurt Eisner.

He began to sport a small toothbrush moustache, and this was no accident. Men who had entered the war with handlebar moustaches had trimmed them to fit the gasmask issued after they came under mustard-gas attack. The toothbrush moustache became the unstated badge of the western front veteran… He moved to Munich, where he would start his further education and eventually become involved, much against his will, in politics.

* * *

As for his father, we have a final glimpse of this extraordinary pedagogue. By now nicknamed Quince Face by his pupils, because of his jaundiced pallor, he retired with high honours aged sixty-five in 1930. In 1989 the writer Alfred Andersch published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Father of a Murderer. It was a fictional account of a school class dominated by a terrifying and sadistic Old Man Himmler, a class ending with Alfred’s summary expulsion…

Heini’s father died in 1936. He had never been the pedagogic sadist depicted by Andersch and his profitable pen, but a stern man of quiet discipline and abiding religious fervour, inspired by a genuine pietas bavarica. The Germans however like their comfortable stereotypes: The Andersch novel was filmed and is now required reading for German schoolchildren.

Stereotypes will continue to blur the image of Heinrich Himmler, confusing though it is. They choke history like bindweed in a jungle, through which we have first to hack and clear a path.