Mundane life of a Nazi monster

Newly-discovered diaries of SS chief Himmler shed a chilling light on how he mixed mass murder with the banal routine of a bureaucrat

AT FIRST glance, the entries read like those of any other desk diary belonging to a senior politician or military figure. Most are matterof-fact, even banal. ‘ 1315 hrs: Discussions with colonel’; ‘1600 hrs: Tea with Governor and agree to be godfather to his son’; ‘ 2200 hrs: Military briefing’; ‘0030 hrs: Played card games’.

But then, as you read more closely, you realise that this diary belonged to no ordinary statesman or soldier.

Take, for example, the entry dated March 21, 1943: ‘ 12 o’clock. Land in Weimar and drive to Buchenwald camp. Lunch at Buchenwald camp. Afterwards continue the visit and return to Weimar.’

or consider this, from January 9, 1943: ‘1315 hrs: Land in Warsaw. Received by SS-Senior Colonel von Sammern-Frankenegg and SS-Lieutenant Colonel Hahn. Lunch in the mess of the Security Police. Drive through the Ghetto. inspection of stockpiles.’

From reading these two small entries alone, it is obvious that the owner of this diary was a man deeply complicit in the atrocious crimes of the Third Reich.

This was a man who not only inspected concentration camps such as Buchenwald, but also dined in them.

Furthermore, this was a man who would fly across occupied europe in order to decide the fates of tens of thousands of Jews whom he had personally ordered to be cruelly crammed into the infamous Warsaw Ghetto.

The diary belonged to none other than Heinrich Himmler, who can be regarded as one of the most notorious mass murderers in history.

As head of the dreaded SS, it was Himmler’s role to oversee the Holocaust and, in doing so, he sent millions to their deaths.

But as well as being a perpetrator of genocide, there was a mundane aspect to Himmler, and it is this chilling combination that emerged yesterday when the German newspaper Bild started publishing extracts from the senior Nazi’s hitherto unseen desk diaries. They were discovered recently in the Russian Military Archive in Podolsk, 30 miles south of Moscow.

The diaries have lain in the archive for 71 years, after they were seized by the Red Army at the end of the war, and shipped back to the Soviet Union where their historical importance was, for years, unappreciated.

COVERING the years 1938, 1943 and 1944, they run to around 1,000 pages and, in the words of Professor Nikolaus Katzer of the German Historical institute (DHI) in Moscow, they constitute ‘a document of shudderingly outstanding historical significance’. it should be stressed that academic historians do not usually make such hyperbolic claims.

ever since the farrago in 1983 of the Hitler Diaries, in which the leading historian Lord Dacre — formerly Hugh Trevor-Roper — was to authenticate what soon emerged to be crude forgeries, experts on the Third Reich are very cautious when a diary supposedly belonging to a highranking Nazi lands on their desks.

However, in this instance, we can be almost sure the diaries are not fakes. Professor Katzer and his team have undoubtedly put the volumes through more validation than Lord Dacre was able to do so by himself in a bank vault in just a few hours, such was the secrecy around the apparent discovery at the time.

And we already have other confirmed volumes of Himmler’s desk diary — from the years 1941, 1942 and 1945 — with which the latest finds compare favourably.

So if the diaries are indeed the real thing, what do they tell us about this most evil of men?

These diaries were not written by Himmler himself. As such, they are not as personal a record as the letters that were published two years ago, in which Himmler could be seen writing fondly to his wife after touring horrific places such as Auschwitz.

These diaries were instead written by a series of adjutants, who would record with utmost meticulousness nearly every hour of Himmler’s long days. But the devil is well and truly present in these pages and pages of details.

on one day in 1944, the diary records how Himmler receives a massage from his private physician. Then the banality slides into brutality.

A little later, the diary records with utter cold-heartedness, how Himmler — presumably sufficiently relaxed after his treatment — orders the execution of ten Poles. Not long after that, the diary notes how the head of the SS demands the provision of new guard dogs at Auschwitz, which are ‘capable of ripping apart everyone but their handlers’.

This constant contrast between Himmler’s two sides — man and monster — is present throughout the diaries.

‘Heinrich Himmler is a beast full of contradictions,’ says Dr Matthias Uhl of the German Historical institute. ‘on one hand, he was the ruthless issuer of death sentences made in passing and the planner of the Holocaust.

‘on the other hand, he was a hypocritical carer for his SS elite, his family, friends and acquaintances.’

No entry captures this contradiction more powerfully than that of March 21, 1943, the day when Himmler visited and had lunch in Buchenwald. That morning, he had helped Hitler celebrate the Day of Commemoration of Heroes in Berlin, during which, unbeknown to the Nazi leadership, Hitler had narrowly missed being assassinated in a failed suicide bombing by a German army officer.

Himmler would have been greeted almost as an old friend at Buchenwald, as the camp commandant, SS-Senior Colonel Hermann Pister, had worked in Himmler’s private motor pool from 1937 to 1939. over lunch, the two men would have chatted about old times, as well as discussing the exigencies of running a camp in which some 56,000 people would eventually be killed.

Himmler regarded the concentration camp system as very dear to what passed for his heart, and he had even personally selected the site of Buchenwald.

Judging by his diary, Himmler would have spent some three-and-ahalf hours at the camp, during which time he would have seen the suffering of so many emaciated prisoners under his ‘care’.

But, then, like the supposedly civilised figure he purported to be, we next see Himmler taking tea with Governor Sauckel at four o’clock, during which this most evil of men agrees to take on the morally wholesome role of godfather to Sauckel’s son. Sauckel was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The diaries also contain a reference to a horrific episode in which Himmler’s twisted dual nature is laid bare.

on February 12, 1943, the diaries show that Himmler arrived in Lublin in occupied Poland at midday, after which he had lunch at the airport hotel. He then boarded a train and the diary blandly notes that, between 3pm and 4pm, he toured the ‘SS-Sonderkommando’.

THIS refers to Himmler’s visit to Sobibor extermination camp that day, during which the head of the SS personally witnessed the gassing of some 400 Jewish girls and young women, before attending an SS celebratory banquet that evening. The atrocity was witnessed by a survivor called Meier Ziss.

‘it was cold already when Himmler and a lot of SS arrived by armoured train,’ recalled Ziss. ‘Girls had been brought in, i don’t know exactly how many, and they had to wait two or three nights before they were gassed.’

Ziss recounted that, during Himmler’s visit, the SS were ordered not to use their sticks or whips in order to make a ‘good impression’.

After seeing the gassing, Himmler was said to have declared he was satisfied with the arrangements at Sobibor, that it was a well-run camp, and he promoted its commandant, Franz Reichleitner, to SS-Captain.

What shocks most about the new diaries is the utter blandness in which visits and events such as this are recorded, and are juxtaposed with the routine chores of officialdom — such as lunches and meetings — endured by any bureaucrat or politician. To appreciate that is to start to understand the unique evil of Nazism.

For men like Himmler thought of themselves as legitimate leaders, and affected the trappings of any modern politician.

What these diaries show is that Himmler desperately wanted to be seen as the embodiment of the effective organiser and networker — the truth, of course, was that his mission was murder.

As Himmler was to say in a speech to a Nazi gathering in october 1943: ‘Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000.

‘To have endured this and, at the same time, to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.’

Himmler was never to receive the justice that he was due. He cheated the noose he would have undoubtedly faced at Nuremberg by biting into a cyanide capsule shortly after he was captured by the British.

But, although we were never to hear his testimony, we do have these diaries. it is thanks to them that we can now gather a much greater understanding of the man who wrote this ‘glorious chapter’ — and help to ensure that, contrary to his wishes, it will not be forgotten.