Heinrich Himmler and the Nazi Millenium

Himmler had his own pet scheme for eastern settlement, which could be subsumed within the general thrust eastwards for lebensraum, but was quite distinct from the Generalplan Ost. All of the details are to be found in The Master Plan: Himmler Scholars and the Holocaust by Heather Pringle.

The Himmler Plan aimed at more than just lebensraum: it was a bizarre scheme for creating a rural idyll in western Russia, harking back to earlier modes of existence, and a more 'authentic' and Germanic way of life. By this, racially pure soldier-farmers would live in medieval-style German houses.

These ideas emerged in part from a work of 1929 by Himmler's close associate, Walther Darre, entitled Farming as a Source of Life for the Nordic Race. Himmler began to move towards a fuller elaboration of his plans with the foundation in 1935 of the Deutches Ahnenerbe Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte, or Ahnenerbe for short, meaning 'something inherited from our forefathers. The Ahnenerbe scholars investigated a whole variety of things, from ancient house designs, 'Nordic' animal breeds and even, by Himmler's specific request, the sexual practices of the ancient German tribes! A model farm was also established at Mehrow to the east of Berlin, where some of the notions were tested.

It was after the invasion of Russia that Himmler began to look to wider horizons, working in collaboration with Konrad Meyer, a senior planner and agricultural scientist, on a scheme that could be presented to Hitler. This was called the Master Plan East. By this Himmler and Meyer envisaged the creation of three huge colonies. The first, stretching south of Leningrad, was called Ingermanland; the second, embracing chunks of eastern Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, was known in the plan as Memel-Narew-Gebiet, and the third, incorporating large parts of the western Ukraine and Crimea, was Gotengau.

All three of these areas were to be completely 'Germanised' within a twenty year period. All Slavs and the 'racially unwanted' were to be killed or enslaved, and the areas repopulated with small villages of German and SS settlers. Each village, Himmler told Felix Kersten, his personal masseur, "will embrace between 30 and 40 farms. Each farmer will receive up to 300 acres of land, more or less according to the quality of the soil. In any case a class of financially powerful and independent farmers will develop. Slaves won't till this soil, rather, a farming aristocracy will come into being, such as you still find on the Westphalian estates." The villages would be dominated by a manor house, occupied an SS or Nazi party leader, a little bit like the feudal lord of the manor. Such was Himmler's view of the Nazi Millenium

Goebbels-the Total War Speech

Josef Goebbels was a superb speaker and propagandist, better, in many ways, than Hitler himself. This carried him forward in the Party, despite his obvious physical shortcomings. Perhaps at no point did he demonstrate this better than in the infamous Total War Speech, delivered in Berlin Sport’s Palace in February 1943. If one wants true insight into the nature of National Socialism, then Goebbels makes a perfect study. It was pure nihilism, and nothing besides.

On the Edge

Printing of Ernst Jünger’s novel “On the Marble Cliffs” (Auf den Marmorklippen ) was stopped in 1940, though existing editions were not withdrawn, supposedly for its subliminal anti-Nazi message. To be perfectly honest I think the message of this little novel can be overstated, and Jünger himself never made any direct claim of the kind. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the book reflects the character of the author in more ways than he might have cared to allow. It is detached, abstract and coldly intellectual; a work of aristocratic condescension; of a man who would never soil his hands in the dirty business of politics.

For each and every contemporary analogy, On the Marble Cliffs is balanced, and more than balanced, by forms of Teutonic mysticism; of Blut und Boden images and ideas that would just as easily have been appreciated and understood by the likes of Alfred Rosenberg. In the end the message is one of despair, of vindictive despair; that the humane values are not worth preserving. The book, for all of its lyricism and beauty, is cold and inert; the work of a man who merely watched while others acted. As much as I admire Jünger, and I do admire him, in the end his intellectual detachment comes dangerously close to an absence of true moral courage

The Timing of the Final Solution

This is a piece I wrote in answer to a question on the Humanities Reference Desk of Wikipedia on the precise timing of Hitler’s decision on the Final Solution. No document has been found or will ever be found, because that’s not the way that Hitler worked. What follows is a set of educated deductions which I have based largely upon Laurence Rees' monograph, Auschwitz: the Nazis and the Final Solution, in the edition published by BBC Books in 2005

By the spring of 1940 it was becoming increasingly clear that the policy of using the General Government as a 'racial dustbin' was causing huge logistical problems. In May 1940 Himmler addressed the issue in a wide-ranging memorandum, in which he rejects 'the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people as fundamentally un-German.' (Lees, p.45) He goes on to say that I hope to see the term 'Jews' completely eliminated through the possibility of large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony. When Himmler discussed this proposal with Hitler he was told that it was gut und richtig (good and correct). But the tenacity of England effectively put an end to all such notions by the autumn and winter of that same year. The problem in the General Government remained, and got steadily worse with the arrival of additional deportees.

Moving further down the line to the summer of 1941, when mass killings were already underway in Russia, we have Göring's memo to Heydrich of 31 July, asking for a blueprint for 'the execution of the intended Final Solution of the Jewish question.' However, as Lees says (p.84), the discovery of a document in the Moscow Special Archive casts some doubt on the particular significance of Göring's memorandum. This contains a note from Heydrich, dated March 26 1941, in which he says;

With respect to the Jewish question I reported briefly to the Reich Marshal and submitted to him my new blueprint, which he authorized with one modification concerning Rosenberg's jurisdiction, and then ordered for resubmission.

This document has to be taken in the context of the coming invasion of the Soviet Union-which was expected to collapse in a few weeks-and the continuing deadlock with the British in the west. In other words, the new destination for the Jews of Europe was no longer Africa, but parts of conquered Russia, including areas expected to be under the jurisdiction of Alfred Rosenberg.

It seems clear that the 31 July document should be read against the background of forced migration, rather than mass murder as such, though in practical terms the end result would have been just the same, as most of the deportees are likely to have frozen to death in the east with the onset of the Russian winter. However, it was the specific actions of the Einsatzgruppen-particularly in the shooting of women and children-that raised yet another set of problems, and a further quest for solutions. The decisive moment here, it might very well be argued, came in August 1941, when Himmler visited Minsk, and saw the work of the killing squads at first hand.

The Minsk killings, and the complaints, amongst others, of Lieutenant-General von dem Bach-Zelewski, that the sheer personal horror involved was having a severe psychological impact on the men in the Kommandos, pushed Himmler along the path of a less 'bloody' solution to the whole issue. He already had before him one possible 'clinical' way out: mass-killing had already been tried and tested in the euthanasia programme, with poison gas being used to kill as many as ten thousand people in mental hospitals in Wartegau and West Prussia between October 1939 and October 1940.

The need for new killing techniques-soon to be explored in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, the continuing build up of Jewish deportees in the ghettos of Poland, and the unexpected stubbornness of Soviet resistance, demanded that the whole issue be re-examined from top to bottom. Amongst others, Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, was lobbying Hitler for more radical solutions, urging the expulsion eastwards of all the Jews of Berlin to already grossly overcrowded ghettos, like that at Lodz. The way out of this deadlock was the authorisation of the first mass gassings at Chelmno, close to Lodz, in late 1941.

Given Hitler's method of working, and his dislike of committing himself to paper, we will never know for certain when outright murder took the place of deportation as the favoured solution to the Jewish question. If I was pushed to choose a specific time-frame, on the basis of the evidence as it presents itself, it would be October 1941. By then the decision had been taken to send all of the Reich's Jews to the east, even though the war with Russia showed no sign of ending. In November, in a conversation with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler said that he wanted all Jews, even those not under German control, 'to be destroyed.' (Lees, p. 110) Here, in essence, is the agenda of the Wannsee Conference, where the populations detailed for elimination included those living in areas not even under German control, including England. The following month the gas vans of Chelmno began their work.

Against this whole drift of events and policy, the Wannsee Conference has been allowed to carry far too much weight. The decision on mass extermination, it seems highly likely, was conveyed by verbal instruction alone by Hitler to Himmler sometime in October. Wannsee was merely a forum for ensuring maximum bureaucratic complicity. Those who attended, with the exception of Heydrich (and even he was not yet in the uppermost ranks of the party leadership) were by and large men of the second-division, like Martin Luther from the Foreign Ministry, representing Ribbentrop; senior bureaucratic functionaries, in other words, implementers of policy, rather than formulators.

Out of the Ashes

In May 1933, under the guidance of Goebbels, Nazi students consigned ‘degenerate books to the flames. What came after; what was left of German literature? What is usually left after a bonfire? Why, ashes.

Speaking at the burning of the books Goebbels announced that "The soul of the German people can express itself again. The flames not only illuminate the end of the old era, they also light up the new." The 'old era' consisted of some 2,500 writers, many of international renown. To fill the gap Goebbels delegated control of literature to Department VIII of his own Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. The Department quickly set up a set of standards, to which all aspiring writers were obliged to conform. Work had to be produced in any one of four categories: Fronterlebnis, stressing the camaraderie of war; Weltanschauung, reflecting the Nazis world view; Heimatroman, stressing the national mystique of the German localities; Rassenkunde, reflecting Nazi views on race.

I am sure it will come as no surprise for you to learn that those who operated within this straight-jacket were distinguished by their mediocrity; people like Werner Bumelburg, who wrote mawkishly sentimental novels about comradeship in the Great War; Rudolf Binding and Bōrries von Münchausen, who wrote tiresome pseudo-Medieval epics.

The few writers who stood out against this apotheosis of the second-rate included Hans Grimm and Gottfried Benn, who though initially supportive of National Socialism, later turned hostile. Others like Ernst Jünger, though a hero of the German right, had always maintained a sense of personal distance. Goebbels' phoenix was nothing more than a turkey.

A Tale of Two Tyrannies

There were similarities between the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic inasmuch as they were both based on a rejection of the liberal tradition; both based on a single ideology and a monolithic ruling party; both on the same coercive forms of social control.

But the differences were far greater than the similarities. National Socialism was regressive and backwards, defined as a repressive cult of power, and no more than a cult of power. The GDR, even at its most oppressive, drew its logic and inspiration from transcendent notions of human liberation, which made its internal contradictions all the greater. It was forced constantly to dissimulate, prevaricate and explain; to justify itself by forms of ideology in every sense alien to that of National Socialism. The Nazi state, moreover, was based on an unstable combination of charisma and mass engagement. The GDR was based on boredom and bureaucratic torpor. One died of excess; the other died of senility.

Carl Jung and the Nazis

The relevant text here is Ueber das Unbewusste-The Role of the Unconscious-published in 1918. The message it contained had limited significance at the time, but by 1930 it had acquired a new reading in the light of events. Germany, according to Jung, was the 'blonde beast' and Christianity was responsible for splitting "the Germanic barbarian into an upper and a lower half." The Jews lack what he calls 'chthonic quality', because they had no homeland of their own. This meant that people like Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler had created "specifically Jewish doctrines...thoroughly unsatisfying to the German mentality." No, it is not Nazism in any direct sense; but these are words upon which new, and dangerous, layers of meaning could be placed

David Irving, a Tragedy in Two Acts

David Irving is a superb historian, meticulous and thorough in his use of and search for primary sources. He is, in a sense, a historian's historian, which only serves to make his offense all the greater.

You see, most Holocaust deniers and Hitler enthusiasts are either stupid or deluded or both. But Irving is not. I read a first edition of Hitler's War in which he does not deny the Holocaust, he simply says that it 'emerged' as a result of ad hoc action by local Gauleiters and the SS.

But anyone who knows anything at all about the Third Reich, and Irving, I do believe, knows more than most, would quickly conclude that nothing, nothing at all, no major initiative of this kind, could ever have happened without Hitler's knowledge and approval. The argument is simply unsustainable.

So, unsustainable as it is, it gave way to outright Holocaust denial. In his blindness, in his political bigotry, Irving committed a sin which for which no historian, no researcher, can be forgiven: he twisted, denied and distorted the facts. He knows the truth: he simply chose to turn away from it in a perverse act of double-think. He gave over his formidable talents to a worthless cause. A superb historian became a wretched human being, the chief victim of his own fraudulent bad-faith. It's tragic.