Both Rauschning and Schellenberg were handsome, self-assured sons of the upper middle class, which perhaps qualifies their ad hominem characterizations, but others remarked Himmler’s slack butt, pigeon chest, receding chin, almost Mongolian eyes and small, feminine hands, and a Nazi Party official’s assessment in 1940 nearly provoked a duel: “If I looked like Himmler,” Gauleiter
18
Albert Forster was overheard to say, “I would not talk about race!” On the other hand, propagandist Josef Goebbels, riding with Himmler on Himmler’s Swedish motorbike as he canvassed for the party, thought him “a good fellow and very intelligent; I like him.” In those early days Himmler served as secretary to Lower Bavarian Gauleiter Gregor Strasser. Strasser described his secretary to his brother Otto as looking like “a half-starved shrew,” but thought him “keen, I tell you, incredibly keen. He has . . . a motorbike. He is underway the whole day—from one farm to another—from one village to the next. Since I’ve had him our weapons have really been put into shape. . . . He’s a perfect arms NCO. He visits all the secret depots.”
Like everyone else who encountered the Reichsführer in full authority, Rauschning and Schellenberg also felt his menace. “The extremist and most bloodthirsty of all the revolutionaries of the Nihilist Revolution,” Rauschning says, completing his portrait, “the most remarkable of the Nazi demigods.” For Schellenberg, Himmler was “after Hitler, the most powerful man in the Reich, yet I could not describe him otherwise than as the archetype of the German schoolmaster. . . . He was like a schoolmaster who graded the lessons of his pupils with finicky exactitude, and for each answer would have liked to enter a mark in his class-book. His whole personality expressed bureaucratic precision, industry and loyalty.” Schellenberg understood that the schoolmasterliness was a “studiously preserved façade,” however, and on another occasion he was chilled by Himmler’s “small, cold eyes behind the pince-nez . . . suddenly lit with sparkle like the eyes of a basilisk.” (“Its hissing drove away all other serpents,” the
Oxford English Dictionary
defines this mythical offspring hatched by a serpent from a cock’s egg, “and . . . its breath, and even its look, was fatal.”)
Heinrich Himmler was the second son of Gebhard and Anna Himmler, born in their comfortable apartment on the Hildegardstrasse in Munich on 7 October 1900. His brother Gebhard was two years older; a younger brother, Ernst, would be born in 1905.
Heinrich’s paternal grandfather had been a soldier who became a police sergeant; Gebhard senior was a schoolmaster, a graduate of the University of Munich in philology. Anna, orphaned at twenty-one, brought a mercantile inheritance to the marriage. One generation up from the Bavarian peasantry, Gebhard senior was assiduous at social climbing — “laughably pushing and fawning towards the upper classes,” a Gymnasium classmate of Heinrich’s would remember. Gebhard’s great triumph had been tutoring a Wittelsbach prince, Heinrich of Bavaria. When the former tutor named his second-born son after Prince Heinrich, the prince agreed to become the boy’s godfather. The embellishments of courtierism surrounded Heinrich in his childhood — “the heavy furniture,” two of his biographers catalogue, “the ancestral portraits, the collection of old coins and German antiquities.” Gebhard senior, another biographer writes, “took every precaution to ensure that his sons’ schooling embodied the social tone appropriate to the family’s status and ambition. He recorded his assessment of the qualities and activities of the boys’ teachers. He also compiled a complete list of all the students in each class, and beside each name he noted the occupation of the child’s father, as if considering how to protect the family from any association which might endanger its social position.”
Here already is an armature of Heinrich Himmler’s life: his “caricature of a sadistic school-teacher,” as the Frankfurt journalist Konrad Heiden saw him, that “conceals the man like a mask,” revealed to be a hand-me-down from his father; familial antecedents in police work and social pretension; clandestine lists detailing vulnerabilities. What Himmler added was servility and malevolence — as long as others did the dirty work.
He entered the Wilhelms Gymnasium at ten, “already wearing gold-rimmed glasses on his rather sharp nose,” his classmate observes, and “not infrequently [showing] a half-embarrassed, half-sardonic smile either to excuse his shortsightedness or to stress a certain superiority.” His father started him keeping a diary, which the pedant schoolmaster read and corrected, denying him even the privacy of his thoughts. He struggled with gymnastics but mastered academics, doggedly maintaining himself second in his class. During summers in the country he read, swam, hiked, kayaked and took up his father’s hobby of scouting medieval German stones and artifacts, from which came the SS’s pretentious heraldry of runes.
At fifteen, midway through adolescence, Heinrich faltered. He recorded in his diary for the first time the nervous stomach trouble that would intermittently send him writhing to bed even at the height of his power. He began to have trouble at school. “The boy’s enthusiasm for school was somewhat dampened,” biographer Bradley F. Smith writes in summarizing Himmler’s diary entries from 1915, “and certain subjects, mathematics in particular, became sheer drudgery. . . . His ability to please and maintain close relations with his teachers also fell off. . . .As his ability to charm his teachers diminished, he became critical of other students who tried to improve their positions by using schoolboy blandishments.” Smith reports “carelessness” and “lapses in responsibility both in and out of school,” after which Heinrich usually reproached himself — in a diary that his father still read. “Actually,” Smith counters, “compared with most boys of his age he was a model of conscientiousness and responsibility; but his family’s rigid system and his own sense of duty made every failing seem heinous.” As Reichsführer, Himmler would see to it that even the small failings of others were heinously punished. Once he subjected his chauffeur to six weeks’ solitary confinement without notifying the man’s family — a small, cruel bureaucratic lashing of night and fog—for the crime of having caused a minor accident with an official car.
There is little direct evidence in the biographical record of Heinrich’s brutalization. His friend and school classmate Karl Gebhardt confirms that Heinrich’s father was “a strict schoolmaster who brought up his son with severity.” But what is ubiquitous is seldom remarked, and parental discipline in this period in Germany was commonly violent, historian Aurel Ende reports:
In the upper classes, bourgeois virtues were being taught, including discipline, punctuality, cleanliness and orderliness. The common educational method was severe corporal punishment. In contrast to the lower classes—where beatings mostly happened in rage — middle- and upper-class parents punished with what they called “complete consideration.”
. . . School was something children were afraid of, had to be afraid of, given the conditions which prevailed. The sadism of many teachers is remembered in nearly all autobiographies.
Schoolmaster violence persisted in Germany for years after it diminished elsewhere in Europe, a byproduct of reactionary pedagogy in response to the failed liberal revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century. “In contrast with pedagogical theory developed in some other European countries by the early 19th century,” writes historian M. J. Maynes, “law and practice in Prussia continued to rest on the maintenance of the teachers’ authority through the use of corporal punishment. . . . Prussia, of course, was not all of Germany. But several other German states [including Bavaria] followed suit.” A contemporary analysis of 323 newspaper reports published between 1906 and 1913 of suicides of young people aged three and a half to twenty found that “fear of punishment” or “bad treatment by parents” was mentioned for 23 percent of the boys and 16 percent of the girls. Another contemporary (1909) analysis of 807 suicides of schoolchildren up to fourteen years old identified “bad treatment by parents or teachers” or “fear of punishment” as the motives in 43 percent of the cases. Certainly Gebhard Himmler—parent and schoolmaster both—was domineering. The change in Heinrich’s behavior at fifteen, like the change in Hitler’s behavior in middle school, probably indicates Heinrich’s passage through confused belligerency.
The Great War, which had begun in August 1914, aggrandized violent solutions to conflict and may have contributed to the change in Heinrich’s behavior; like other schoolboys, he followed the battles eagerly and yearned to become a soldier. He envied his older brother Gebhard, who joined the army reserve in 1915; Heinrich was stuck in the Jugendwehr, a preliminary training program for high school students. Gebhard moved on to officer training in the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry, service in Lorraine and a battlefield promotion to warrant officer. Only after the war had ground on for four years, in January 1918, did Heinrich also begin training as a cadet in the Eleventh Infantry. He liked soldiering but wrote home complaining of bedbugs and bad food. His mother responded with a barrage of parcels. He started smoking and asked his parents to send visiting cards so he could make the rounds of local relatives. A rumor, unfounded, that he might be dropped from training and shipped to the front panicked him: he was prepared to fight as an officer but not to die as cannon fodder in the grimy trenches.
Further training in the summer of 1918 led to a machine-gun course in the autumn and a few weeks of drilling recruits, but Germany went down to defeat and the war ended before he could be commissioned; he was discharged in December 1918 without having risked even a soldier’s defensive violence. A letter to his parents in Landshut, the town forty miles northeast of Munich where they had moved for Gebhard senior’s work, suggests that Himmler’s vindictive, devious, paranoid adult character was beginning to coalesce. “He was unsettled by stories of attacks on officers,” Smith summarizes, “which had occurred here and there, even in Bavaria, and begged his parents to send him some civilian clothes so that he would be able to travel safely.” In a postscript in shorthand, however, a code to his father that his mother could not read, he added, “Now [a message] only for you. I don’t know how it is in Landshut. Don’t let mother go out alone at night. Not without protection. Be careful in your letters. You can’t be sure. Have no fears on my account for I am sly as a fox.”
Himmler had begun military training two years short of Gymnasium graduation. With other veterans he returned to school in Landshut in January 1919 to take advantage of a special six-month accelerated program. Violence continued to preoccupy him. He and his closest friend, Falk Zipperer, had begun writing poetry. Zipperer, who had served in the front lines, preferred to write about spring flowers and roguish eyes, but despite his country’s defeat Himmler in his poetry almost always celebrated war. “Frenchmen, Frenchmen, oh pay close attention / For there will be no pardon for you,” he wrote, threatening “bullets” that “whistle and hiss / Spreading fright and terror” and combatants “sternly hack[ing] away.” His military fantasies suggest that he was prepared to try violence at least in combat, but combat continued to evade him. When it appeared that Bavarian Freikorps paramilitary units would attack the Soviet republic that had been declared in Munich in early April, he was eager to participate. His father maneuvered to delay him in school, however, and he only succeeded in joining the Landshut Freikorps a day or two before the Munich regime collapsed on 1 May 1919—too late, once again, to be blooded in battle.
This continuing failure to test his violent resolution helps explain a decision Himmler made when he finished Gymnasium in July 1919—a decision his biographers have found inexplicable: to train for a career in agriculture despite his lack of background in farming. People who succeed at violence gain a violent reputation that endorses their violent resolution. And while criminal violence is despised in civil society, military violence is often honored and respected, gilded with the heroics of accomplishment and sacrifice. Himmler’s career decision, seemingly rustic and pastoral, was in fact missionary and militant. In the summer of 1919, he decided to become a
Lebensraum
pioneer: to prepare himself to colonize the East as a warrior-farmer. His most succinct statement of his intentions appears in his diary in late 1921: “If there is another campaign in the East I will go along. The East is most important for us. The West will die easily. In the East we must fight and colonize.” In 1919 his plan manifested itself as an extended but unsuccessful effort to learn Russian and a decision to train as an agronomist. This choice of profession, déclassé from his family’s perspective, undoubtedly disappointed his father.
Himmler’s startling and seemingly disjunct decision in fact coincided with major public events. Historian Anna Bramwell lists some of them:
Securing German expansion to the East had been a red thread in German politics; during the First World War, Max Sering, for example, widely regarded as a liberal intellectual, and certainly not a Nazi supporter in later years, produced a detailed plan in 1915 to establish 250,000 German peasant settlements in Courland [an agricultural region in Russian Latvia]. Arrangements were made with Baltic landowners to give up a third of their land for this purpose after the war. The loss of what became Lithuania after 1918 ended the program. In 1917, a Vereinigung für deutsche Siedlung und Wanderung [Union for German Settlement and Migration] aimed at settling German peasants from the Russian interior in the Baltic lands then occupied by Germany. Dr. Stumpfe, a member of the Prussian Agricultural Ministry, suggested “solving the German-Polish problem” by an exchange of population: Poles in Germany against Germans in what was then “Russian Poland.”
A plan like Sering’s began to seem possible when the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey) concluded a separate armistice with the new Bolshevik Russian government on 5 December 1917. In the peace treaty that Leon Trotsky negotiated and signed at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia recognized the independence of the Ukraine and Georgia, confirmed the independence of Finland and gave up Russian Poland (western Byelorussia) and the Baltic states to Germany and Austria-Hungary. “Massive settlements were planned in the Baltic lands for some 250,000 German farmers,” Bramwell comments. In the general armistice of 11 November 1918, however, Germany was forced to renounce the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Russia later revoked it as well, but for some time afterward the German army continued to threaten to go back to war to enforce it. (That the war in the East had seemed to end in German victory was convincing evidence to many, including Adolf Hitler, that Germany had lost the Great War not through military defeat but through a vicious “stab in the back.”)