A Drop of History 91

Himmler, the great butcher’s progress and end
The SS supermen and the capsule in the tooth

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, number two in the hierarchy of terror that was the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler’s confidant to the last moments, when defeated Germany was surrounded and he negotiated alone its surrender to the Allies, was undoubtedly one of the most criminal characters in history. The SS, which he led, and the extermination camps, which he organised, systematically led to death millions of people who had the misfortune of being born outside the Aryan race, with whose propagation and predominance Himmler was obsessed.

Short, gaunt, short-sighted, he still inspired dread to all around him from the age of barely twenty-three, when he became a member of an extreme right organisation in Bavaria, until the age of forty-five, when, captured by the Americans, he committed suicide. A conscientious exterminator of Jews in particular, and all those who were not blond blue-eyed Germans in general, he was immersed in an ocean of fantasies concerning the society he wanted to create. Such a realisation, of course, proceeded through rivers of blood and untold horror.

Himmler compulsively sought the primordial beginning of the Aryan race and his plan was that the breeding of the select German race should be complete within 120 years. As overseer of the concentration camps, he dispatched millions of people, but in his daily life he remained an incurable petit bourgeois. Even at his time of absolute power, Himmler would not live in the city, but on a small farm, where his wife had started a hennery.

In his sick mind, racist theories, old German legends and medieval views coexisted with methods of extreme brutality. His father was awfully authoritarian and did not approve of his son’s marriage to Margarete Boden, who was a divorcee of Polish descent. Himmler was already chief of the SS, but he had made the following incredible confession to a friend: “I’d rather kick a thousand communists out of a pub than present myself to my father and tell him about this marriage.”

As chief of the SS, he was the terror of Europe as a whole; as chief of the concentration camps, he was the terror of minorities; as chief of Internal Security, he was the terror of the entire Reich supreme command. In 1935 he had founded an institute for the study of the German race and he had sent a specialised research team to Tibet, in search of traces of the ancient, genuine Aryans, who, in his belief, had passed through those parts.

He imposed the so-called “SS marriage code”, according to which any SS who wanted to marry had to send his intended to a special centre to be examined as to whether her blood had been tainted by inferior races since 1750, an arbitrary limit set by Himmler himself. He also tried to impose an old Teutonic legend, according to which a child born out of its parents’ intercourse on the grave of its ancestors would inherit the courage of the buried man – but not even the SS would have sex on graves. In Himmler’s sick fantasies, following the occupation of Russia, the SS would live isolated in medieval-style fortresses in order to remain untainted, and he had assigned an eminent biologist the task of creating a superhorse, on which the supermen would gallop out of their fortresses.

And yet, that man, who was called a “headsman” even by Hitler’s ministers, believed he was enjoying great prestige abroad. When he surrendered to the Americans, they asked him to write his name on a piece of paper, so that the secret services could verify his identity. Himmler was glad, believing they were actually asking for his autograph. He was certain he would be led directly to general Montgomery, to negotiate the surrender of Germany to the Allies. He intended to suggest an alliance, but on condition that they cooperate in the struggle against the Russian bolsheviks. All that without realising that he was wanted for millions of murders.

Thus, only when he found himself before the American sergeant-major Edwin Austin, the former street-sweeper, who ordered him to strip, did Himmler realise that he had reached the end of the road. He stripped, submitted to body search, but when the sergeant-major and a doctor tried to pry his mouth open, he reacted. On the right side of the upper jaw, in the place of a pulled tooth, Himmler, like all Nazi leaders, had implanted a cyanide capsule. The capsule could withstand the careful chewing of food, but not a sharp bite that meant to break it. They were unable to stop him. Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, the greatest murderer of modern world history, fell dead before the victors. Where his spirit flew, at least four million souls were waiting to ask him Why?

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 90

Himmler, the murderer who loved animals
And killed a million people a year

On May 23, 1945, just outside Hamburg, in a building occupied by the Allies, an American sergeant-major (former street-sweeper), Edwin Austin, stood before a German prisoner, who had been arrested the day before at a roadblock on a Bremen bridge. The prisoner was an insignificant-looking middle-aged man with a shaved head and thick round spectacles, exuding something between impudence, panic and madness. The American sergeant-major, in fact, stood before one of the greatest butchers of human history, a bloodthirsty and relentless inquisitor, before whose crimes most of the worst murderers of humankind paled.

That was the man who spread terror over Nazi-occupied Europe, the creator and chief – to the end – of the infamous SS, chief of the Gestapo, head of all the 3rd Reich secret services, head commissioner of racist policy, chief inspector of concentration camps and Home Secretary. It is estimated that over four million people died as a direct result of his conscious orders while the Nazi regime was in power.

The American sergeant-major looked unfazed at the man who inspired fear even to leading executives of the Reich, like Rudolf Hess, Wilhelm Canaris, Hermann Göring and Erwin Rommel. “Strip,” he ordered.

“You don’t know who I am,” the prisoner replied, in his accustomed authoritarian way.

“I know,” replied the American, “you are Heinrich Himmler. I knew you from the spectacles. Now strip.”

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was the Reich’s number two, second only to Adolf Hitler. Hundreds of books have been written about him, doctors, historians and sociologists trying to probe the depths of that hideous criminal personality. What emerges out of his speeches, his writings, his outrageous actions and his lifestyle is a psychopathic personality, with abysmal contradictions.

Orchestrating the mass extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and foreign prisoners, he said in a speech to the chiefs of police: “We have to deal decisively with the Jews, annihilate the Jewish race. Most of you know what a hundred, five hundred or a thousand corpses lined up side by side look like. The fact that we can walk by them, calm and unmoved, is what makes us so strong. This is a glorious page of our history, the likes of which have never been written before and will never be written again.”

And yet, the same man would berate his Finnish masseur, Felix Kersten, who had a passion for hunting: “I wonder at your ability to find enjoyment in shooting a poor animal that grazes unsuspectingly in the woods. If we look at it closely, it is clear murder. Every animal has the right to live.”

Still, in a speech delivered in Posen, Himmler declared: “I am not concerned with the fate of a Russian or a Czech. It is indifferent to me whether these nations flourish or starve. They only interest me as our slaves. I do not care if ten thousand Russian women faint or die digging a trench, as long as the trench is dug. This does not mean that we Germans are harsh or cruel; it simply means that we know how to use efficiently both animals and human animals.”

And this man, who killed a million people a year while the war lasted, considered an illegitimate child he had with his secretary as his greatest sin. He had acknowledged the child, but right up to the end of his life he would weep whenever he remembered that misstep.

Now the American sergeant-major and former street-sweeper stood before that deplorable case of a man who had earned himself the dubious title of the most infamously criminal personage of history, the one who, at the peak of his power, had thirty-eight armed divisions of SS as his personal army (troops that did not answer to the general command but to himself alone), and ordered, with the victor’s cheeky candour: “Strip”.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 77

“Lili Marleen”, a legend of a song

In 1923, German composer and Great War veteran Hans Leip wrote a song about the loneliness of the soldiers in the muddy trenches, far from female company. The song’s title was rather long-winded – “Das Lied Eines Jungen Soldaten Auf Der Wacht” (“The Song Of A Young Soldier On Watch”) – but its chorus included a magical female name: Lili Marleen.

In 1938, Norbert Schultze set the song to a march-like waltz tune. It started with a trumpet and a drum roll, and continued at a brisk pace to the end, an ideal rhythm for the militaristic times the world was going through. When the composer gave the song to Lale Andersen, an unknown blonde chanteuse who was merely making a living in the Berlin cabaret scene, Germany was about to plunge the world into the chaos of the second World War. Lale Andersen made a 78 rpm record of it, performing it in the deep, rather husky tones that German audiences loved, devoted as they were to the great Marlene Dietrich’s style and songs.

The song remained obscure until April 1941, when the German army occupied Yugoslavia and entered Belgrade. Radio Belgrade had a transmitter powerful enough to be received all the way to Northern Africa. The German command turned it into a station of propaganda and heartening of the thousands of German soldiers of the Afrika Korps, who were fighting under Erwin Rommel. They asked Berlin for music records, as the propagandists knew very well that a schedule of nothing but speeches and marches would drive the station listeners away. Among the dusty packs of records that arrived was this song, which had gone unnoticed until then.

For some unknown reason, the song was an instant hit with the German troops in Africa. The station officials received thousands of letters from soldiers who demanded to hear “Lili Marleen” again and again. It ended up being played every twenty minutes. It became a sort of marching song for the Afrika Korps, and from Africa it spread all over blazing Europe. Minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels realised instantly that he had a treasure in his hands. He gave Lale Andersen a regular show on Radio Berlin, where she sang live with her band for the troops. In next to no time, “Lili Marleen” was sung by millions of soldiers on the eastern front, the western front, and around the Mediterranean.

Then the unbelievable happened. The song that uplifted one side of the war crossed the frontline and became a signature song for the other side as well. In 1943 and ’44, “Lili Marleen” became an anthem for the British, the French, the American troops that fought against the Germans. Both sides sang the same tune while butchering each other. Only in Russia did it fail to become a hit, as Stalin banned it. Its success was such that the German command had a statue of Andersen made and set along the road to Smolensk, in Russia, where the troops passed on the way to the eastern front. Its sight lifted the spirits of the tired soldiers.

Lale Andersen was worshipped by both Axis and Allied troops, became a propaganda tool for the Third Reich, but she did not really support the regime. At the peak of her glory, she fell in love with Rolf Liebermann, a Jew who lived free in neighbouring Switzerland. The Reich could have forgiven her a lot, but not that. The Gestapo located her and, when faced with arrest, she attempted suicide. The victorious Allies found her in a bomb-ruined hospital.

Andersen lived with her Jewish husband until 1972, well-off through the royalties of her song, which was banned in post-war Germany as a Nazi anthem but continued to sell millions of records in Western Europe and America. Marlene Dietrich, in fact, adopted it to such an extent, and performed it so many times, that many people remain under the impression that it was her own hit. It seems that no other song ever spoke to the hearts of the tired, lonely soldiers of any side like the famous husky chorus of “die eine Lili Marleen”.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved