Heinrich Himmler : A Life (15 page)

This perception applied to both his personal and his political life. His irritability and opinionated arrogance, which during the previous years had become increasingly evident and had more than once got him into difficulties, now became more marked and were fatally combined with his already well-known tendency to interfere in other people’s affairs.

This was particularly apparent in the way in which Heinrich intervened in the engagement of his brother Gebhard during 1923–4. This episode demonstrates how frustrated he had become after the failed putsch, but it also shows how this failure had made him increasingly and blatantly aggressive, something which those closest to him were now to experience in a most dramatic fashion.

In November 1921 Gebhard had become engaged to Paula Stölzle, the daughter of a banker from Weilheim. From the start Himmler had certain reservations about the engagement.
¹⁶
After ‘searching for a long time’ he had chosen as his engagement present a gift that barely concealed his ambivalent feelings: Agnes Günther’s novel
The Saint and the Fool
.
¹⁷

When tensions emerged in the relationship during 1923—Gebhard accused Paula of being too friendly towards another man—Himmler acted as intermediary at the request of his brother. However, he interpreted his role rather differently from how Gebhard envisaged it.
¹⁸
He wrote a letter to Paula in which he reminded her that a man must have ‘the assurance from his fiancée that she will not be unfaithful to him with a single word, a look, a touch, or a thought, even if he spends years away from her and they never see each other and often don’t hear from each other for a long time, which might well be the case during the war years that are soon to come’. But Paula had failed this test ‘dismally’. If her marriage was to be a happy one then she must be ‘kept on a tight rein with
barbaric
strictness’. Since she was not ‘strict and harsh’ with herself and his brother was ‘too good for you and has too little knowledge of human nature’, someone else would have to undertake this task. It is no surprise that he felt it ‘incumbent upon myself to
do this’.
¹⁹
Paula’s response was friendly but firm; she told him to mind his own business.
²⁰

Himmler, however, could not get over this incident, which he regarded as a matter of family honour. Some months later he heard another tale about Paula which prompted him to urge his parents to end the engagement.
²¹
It was only after he had been successful in this initiative that he approached his brother directly in ‘the Paula matter’, and ‘spoke to him frankly about breaking off the engagement and told him what I thought of her in no uncertain terms’. During this conversation he learnt from Gebhard that Paula ‘had already lost her innocence and was herself largely to blame’. He was surprised by how calmly Gebhard had taken it: ‘Gebhard hasn’t taken the whole thing (the breaking off of the engagement) to heart, but has completely come to terms with it. It’s as if he has no soul; he shakes if off like a poodle. Our conversation lasted until half past ten. Read the paper. Slept. What a way to waste one’s time.’
²²

When Gebhard informed Paula and her parents in writing of his wish to break off the engagement,
²³
Paula, who in the meantime had come to the conclusion that marrying Gebhard would not be a good idea, replied accusing her ex-fiancé of ‘allowing Heinrich to come between us and to tell me what to do’. She found it incomprehensible how ‘your brother, who is two years younger than you, can have the nerve to think that he’s entitled, for your sake and based on his experience of life, to tell me how to live my life’. She had found it very insulting.
²⁴

But Himmler was not prepared to let the matter rest. In March 1924, when the engagement had already been broken off, he hired a private detective to collect damaging material on Paula and in this way dug up some worthless small-town gossip.
²⁵
Moreover, without Gerhard’s knowledge he made enquiries about his brother’s ex-fiancée from his acquaintances in Weilheim, only for the eventuality that the matter should have further repercussions, as he assured his informants. In the event of that happening he wanted to possess ‘material’ detrimental to the Stölzle family.
²⁶

With the ‘Paula matter’ Himmler’s obsession with interfering in other people’s private affairs and his almost voyeuristic interest in collecting details about their lives had reached a temporary high point. However, shortly afterwards he also alienated close friends with his didactic, totally humourless, and arrogant manner. This is documented in a letter from May 1924 to his friends Friedl and Hugo, whose hospitality he had been happy to enjoy only a few months earlier.
²⁷
The banal cause of the break was a postcard,
which Friedl had sent to Himmler’s mother three days earlier, in which she had asked Gebhard and Heinrich to advise Hugo, as they had promised to do, about the planned purchase of a car. Himmler could not stand the friendly ironic tone of this card:

We consider the style adopted in the card to my mother dated 20.5.24, which we received on the morning of the 22.5.24, to be decidedly hurtful to Gebhard and myself and therefore rather inappropriate. To start with, I find the first phrase ‘in my hour of need’ to be at the very least totally inappropriate. To speak of ‘need’ because one has not received a reply for three days in a matter concerning a car is at least an exaggeration. Evidently Friedl has no idea what need is! And then to write ‘if neither of your two sons can be bothered’. I hope that you and Friedl are convinced that I am grateful to you for your generous hospitality and for the friendship that you have shown me up until now [
sic
] and that I am not expressing my gratitude for reasons of convention (I don’t recognize them) but from inner conviction.

Deeply hurt, he continued:

I also believe that you will remember that I told you that you could rely on me in any situation, even and particularly if there should be a real need. I also believe I can say that I have always responded to small requests from you as if I was doing it for myself. So even if Friedl did not trust Gebhard, although that would be completely unjustified, she should have had enough trust in me to be sure that I wouldn’t have let this matter go by the board.

Himmler also let his friends know to whose influence he attributed the insulting card: it could only be an act of revenge by Paula Stölzle, who, so he suspected, was stirring up hostility to him among his circle of friends! She was also the target of his warning that one should not get on the wrong side of him. He could, when forced to, ‘behave very differently’, and would ‘not stop until the opponent concerned had been excluded from all moral and respectable society’. Evidently completely unaware of his impertinence, Himmler had the effrontery to end his letter with an appeal for sympathy: ‘Unfortunately, I’m still here. Things are taking a terribly long time. This waiting for weeks on end is getting on my nerves. And these weeks that one is wasting in waiting later on could have turned out to be useful.’
²⁸

However, Himmler did receive some acknowledgment of his stance as a solitary hero and unappreciated pioneer of the völkisch cause. In June 1924 he received a letter from a female friend, which she had written more than six months before, a few days after the putsch, but had not sent off. Himmler
admired this young woman, Maria Rauschmayer, the daughter of a Munich professor and colleague of his father’s, who was working on her doctoral dissertation in the summer of 1924.
²⁹
Mariele had already appeared several times in his diary as ‘an exceptionally clever girl with a strong and honourable character who deserves the greatest respect’ and who was admirably patriotic.
³⁰

Maria Rauschmayer wrote to Himmler as someone who shared her political views. She wanted to inform him about the events taking place and the political mood in Munich; she shared his anger and disappointment at Kahr’s ‘betrayal’; she wanted to encourage and support him in his political stance. But the letter also reveals sympathy and admiration that was deeply felt. Rauschmayer described her feelings on that 9 November when she encountered Himmler in front of the besieged army headquarters, the former Bavarian War Ministry:

In front of the War Min. troops of the Reichskriegsflagge. Heinrich Himmler in the vanguard, the flag on his shoulder, one could really see how secure the flag felt and how proud he was of it. I go up to him, unable to speak a word. But within me I can feel welling up the words

Be proud: I am carrying the flag!
Be free of care: I am carrying the flag!
Be fond of me: I am carrying the flag!

In all my life I have never given a firmer handshake for I knew that he felt the same as me: for years unable to think of anything but Germany, Germany, Germany.

She concluded: ‘This letter is for my friend Heinrich Himmler. It is intended as a small gesture indicating my deep gratitude and loyal acknowledgment of a deed which, for a few hours, once again gave one reason to hope. The letter has been written during the hours of deep disappointment and depression that followed.’
³¹

In August he received another letter from her, a glowing declaration of belief in their common cause: ‘For years to be able to think of nothing else, to work for it for years; Nation and Fatherland as the grandest cause is like a prayer emerging from one’s innermost being.’ She herself, however, did not wish to play an active part in the völkisch movement, and her reason for not doing so will have met with Himmler’s full approval: ‘You are a combat group, who want to clear a swamp, and marsh-goblins and swamp-witches are so revolting that I don’t want to have anything to do
with them. My view of the ideal German woman is to be at your side as a comrade and then to be with you after the fight.’ She wrote that, shortly beforehand, she had responded to a request to form a völkisch women’s group as follows:

Get yourself some kind of wake-up apparatus and awaken the best girls that you can find in Germany to the need to remain pure German women—so that the men, who nowadays have no time for it, will know where to get their wives from. But that is a small matter, for nowadays the struggle for survival is more difficult for women than for men. The result is that some get married who would have provided the best material, but who are still too young to be able to wait—and maybe to wait in vain.
³²

Himmler kept these two letters in his private papers. Unlike Paula, who, measured against his ideal, had so clearly failed, ‘Mariele’ had reinforced his fantasy of the ideal woman, who would reserve herself for the solitary, celibate fighter. Bearing in mind how central his commitment to this image of womanhood was for Himmler’s self-image as a man, a soldier, a political activist, and as a self-styled Teuton, one can guess how important Maria Rauschmayer’s encouragement would have been to him, particularly at a time when he felt anything but secure.

Himmler’s reading from the period 1923–4 shows that he was trying to find a ‘world-view’ in the broadest sense that would provide him with a solid foundation for his life. It is striking that he tried to integrate the most important elements of radical right-wing ideology, which are increasingly apparent in his thinking—anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, racism, hostility to democracy—into a far more comprehensive world-view, cobbled together from the most varied sources.

He distanced himself more and more from Roman Catholicism. Instead, he became increasingly preoccupied with works that, in his view, dealt with occult phenomena in a serious ‘scholarly’ way; for example, a book about ‘Astrology, Hypnosis, Spiritualism, Telepathy’,
³³
topics which, at the peak of the inflation and during the subsequent period of upheaval, were generally in vogue.
³⁴
In 1925 he was to read a book about the power of pendulums,
³⁵
and in the same year he approached an astrologer with a request for four horoscopes.
³⁶

He was impressed by an account of the Pyramid of Cheops—‘history built and written in stone and a representation of the universe, which a genius has written in the form of this pyramid’—since it showed ‘a range of knowledge that we conceited people of culture have long ago lost and even now have not recovered to the same extent’.
³⁷

During January and February 1923 he read a book on Spiritualism, and commented in his notes that it had convinced him that Spiritualism was true. Thus, Himmler assumed that it was possible to communicate with the souls of the dead.
³⁸
Already, in May 1921, he had read a book twice within a short time which claimed to prove there was life after death; despite being somewhat sceptical, he was inclined to believe the evidence put forward. ‘The transmigration of souls’, he noted at the end of his commentary on it.
³⁹
It was a topic that was also to preoccupy him after he became Reichsführer-SS (RFSS).

In December 1923 he began reading Ernst Renan’s
The Life of Jesus
, and approved of its anti-Jewish interpretation of the Son of God. This allowed him to overlook the fact that some things in the book were ‘certainly not right’. At least Renan illuminated ‘many matters that have been kept secret from us’.
⁴⁰
In February 1924 he perused Ernst Haeckel’s
The Riddle of the World
but completely rejected its monist world-view; ‘the motley collection of unproven attacks on and denials of a personal God’ were ‘absolutely disgusting’.
⁴¹
Thus, despite his growing doubts about Catholic teachings, he had not yet broken with his God.