Heydrich had in 1932 founded a leadership school at Bad-Toelz in Bavaria, a centre for training which was to be maintained, with considerable variation in its curriculum, until well into the years of the war. Heydrich was as much concerned with the intelligence as he was with the physique of the S.S. leader. Sport, gymnastics and other activities that imposed the meaning of discipline on the students were the basis of their education, together with the Nazi version of history, geography, militarism and racial consciousness.
Himmler was determined to establish a centre for the S.S. leadership which would be worthy of the racial purification they represented. Though Himmler’s mind had moved far from the Catholicism in which he had been brought up, the self-dedication of the Catholic monastic orders influenced him in devising his plans for this centre. Even Hitler compared him with Ignatius Loyola. Walter Schellenberg, who had studied both medicine and law at the University of Bonn and was one of the bright young intellectuals who joined Heydrich’s S.D., was later to become one of the inner circle of men who made a study of Himmler and learned how to control him. In his Memoirs he writes: ‘The S.S. organization had been built up by Himmler on the principles of the Order of the Jesuits. The service statutes and spiritual exercises presented by Ignatius Loyola formed a pattern which Himmler assiduously tried to copy.’9 The Jesuitical ideal in Himmler’s mind merged with his medieval vision of the Teutonic knights, whose combination of religious observance and brutalized chivalry inspired him to found a similar S.S. Order of Knights in a Germanic castle of their own.
The Order of Teutonic Knights founded at the close of the twelfth century with the combined aim of conquest and conversion, had its centre in the castle of Marienburg, which became the residence of the Grand Master of the Order. The Teutonic Knights boasted alike of their valour and their statesmanship, their self-denial and their skill as administrators, and at the height of their power in the fourteenth century they stretched their conquests through Poland as far as the Baltic States. The image of the Grand Master became a part of Himmler’s obsession, but his mind, incapable of largeness of thought or inspiration, could only absorb simplified concepts from past history out of which he attempted to create dogmas for the present. He began to see himself as Grand Master of a modern Teutonic order designed to rid Nordic German society of degenerate infiltration by Jewish blood. Like the medieval Teutonic Knights, he also looked east towards that other great threat to German purity, the inferior Slav races with their evil communist doctrines. As he put it himself in 1936: ‘We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of sub-humans be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.’10
For inspiration he founded the new Teutonic castle of Wewelsburg in the forests near Paderborn, an ancient town in Westphalia with historic associations that went back to Charlemagne. Wewelsburg was built on the foundations of a medieval burgh; it was designed for him by an architect called Bartels and took a year to construct, at a cost of some 11 million marks.
According to Schellenberg, the castle was run like a monastery and a hierarchic order of leadership after the pattern of the Catholic Church was imposed on those members of the S.S. privileged to visit Wewelsburg for the regular retreats organized by Himmler, who was, in Jesuitical terms, General of the Order. Each member of the secret Chapter had his own chair with a silver name-plate, and ‘each had to devote himself to a ritual of spiritual exercises aimed mainly at concentration’, the equivalent of prayer, before discussing the higher policy of the S.S.11
Wewelsburg was Himmler’s only indulgence in the kind of luxury with which most of the Nazi leaders were surrounded. The castle was as magnificently appointed in the medieval manner as Carinhall, Göring’s vast residence north of Berlin which he was extending and reconstructing at the same time as Himmler was building Wewelsburg. The design and association of the rooms were supposed to conjure the spirit of Germany’s greatness; each was named after an historic figure such as Frederick the Great, and a collection of relics of the past was assembled in the castle’s museum. Himmler’s own room was named after Heinrich I, Henry the Fowler, the king who a thousand years before had been the founder of the German Reich.
The S.S. leaders, whether they were intellectuals or not, had to submit to these historical charades in order to please Himmler, who gave more and more of his time to the detailed study of such useless history as his power increased. Himmler had in him the makings of a recluse, a ruthless anchorite devoted to his studies and determined to remake mankind in the particular image conjured up by his eccentric scholarship. The great tragedy of our time is that for several years he possessed the power to experiment in Europe at the cost of millions of lives.
He had become by now violently anti-Catholic and anti-Christian, substituting for the faith in which he had been reared a facile acceptance of those particular superstitions, such as astrology, that suited his Germanic prejudice.12 The Catholic Church came under attack in Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Guards), the illustrated weekly journal of the S.S. which began publication in April 1935 with the S.S. chronicler Gunter d’Alquen acting as editor under the special direction of Heydrich.
Himmler founded at the same time an institution known as the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) for research into Germanic racial origins.13 Himmler made himself President of this Society, and its director was Professor Dr Walther Wuest, whom Himmler made an honorary captain in the S.S. The institute had a special task to link the present with the past by investigating the claims of the Nordic peoples of belonging to Indo-Germanic stock and to revive the spiritual and cultural heritage of this, the noblest race on earth. Ahnenerbe undertook, for example, extensive archaeological excavations of Germanic remains at Nauen and Altkristenberg, and even sent an expedition to Tibet. To pay for these researches Himmler turned once more to his friend Keppler, Hitler’s economic adviser, who founded a society of industrialists called the Friends of the Reichsführer S.S. which subscribed large sums to support Himmler in this work.
The supervision of the concentration camps passed to Himmler and the S.S. after the Roehm purge. Heydrich took charge of this work and made Eicke, now a brigadier-general of the S.S., his Inspector of Camps. The Death’s Head Unit, which Eicke had trained for Himmler, took charge of those camps which had been established on a permanent basis, such as Dachau, the so-called model camp in the south, Buchenwald, founded centrally near Weimar in 1937, and the northern camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin-Oranienburg. The base camps and their subsidiaries multiplied with the development of tyranny until their establishment reached nearly a hundred centres before the war, and afterwards extended over the whole of occupied Europe with the spread of Hitler’s conquests.
The record of these camps, in which between five and six million Jewish victims alone are estimated to have died by the end of the war, became the ultimate indictment of the Nazi system. Their continued existence over a period of twelve years makes our century, which should have been the most civilized, one of the worst in human history. A pathological fear of the camps and what was done in them to helpless people spread all over Germany and occupied Europe; even to admit knowledge of them at the time they were in operation became a lasting inhibition in the minds of most German people. Open recognition of detailed facts which were first made known at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg after the war and have been elaborated at subsequent trials is still avoided by the majority of people both inside and outside Germany.