Himmler’s immersion in the past did not limit his interest in the future. He always urged his S.S. men to procreate in order to increase the number of pure-blooded German stock in Europe. This advice culminated in Himmler’s celebrated edict published in October 1939, in which he exhorted the S.S. to conceive children before going into battle. He watched the S.S. birthrate most carefully, but statistics for August 1936 which have been preserved show that the average size for S.S. families at that time was only between one and two children. At the same time, Himmler was determined to take care of the mothers of illegitimate children provided both they and their babies met the required racial standards.
In 1936 the S.S. became the sponsor of the Lebensborn (Fount of Life) maternity homes, in which Himmler took great pride and which, as innumerable surviving records show, he supervised personally down to the last detail. In taking responsibility for the welfare of these young Germans, the S.S. ensured that they were suitably indoctrinated from the very start of their education, and every man had to contribute to the maintenance of these homes with deductions from his pay, the main burden being borne by bachelors.19
Himmler was true to his own teaching. Conscious, no doubt, that many people thought his own appearance remarkably ‘un-Aryan’, he ordered elaborate researches to be undertaken into his ancestry. The files of memoranda on this subject still exist, and they continue well into the period of the war; the centre for this research was at Wewelsburg, from which statements supplemented by elaborate genealogical forms would arrive as each stage of the investigation back to the eighteenth century was gradually completed. Similar research was undertaken into the ancestry of Marga Himmler. As soon as Himmler’s interest became known, namesakes would write to him begging to be acknowledged as kinsmen of the Reichsführer S.S.
Himmler, an addict to detail, spent time in his office poring over letters and memoranda all concerned with proving the purity of his blood and that of his family, his staff and the men under his command. The surviving documentation on all this research, which represented years of painstaking work by large numbers of genealogists and clerks, and in many cases bitter heart-searching by those unable to prove their ancestry to be free of defilement, amounted to thousands of items in the bursting files of undestroyed Nazi history. After the war had already begun, Himmler intervened personally to reprimand an S.S. man who had accepted refreshments from the father of a Jew he was escorting from a concentration camp, and in April 1940 he sent a long letter of sympathy to another S.S. man at the front who had put on paper the terrible shock he received when he had discovered he possessed Jewish blood. He wrote antedating ancestral purity by a further century:
‘I can so well imagine your position and your feelings. So far as our blood is concerned, I have stipulated that the end of the Thirty Years War (1648) is to be the day to which each of us is obliged to make sure of his ancestry. Should there be some Jewish blood after that date a man must leave the S.S… . In telling you all this I hope that you will understand the great sacrifice I have to impose on you… In your heart of hearts you still belong to us, you can still feel you are an S.S. man.’
Himmler softens the blow he so sympathetically deals by adding that if the man were to die at the front, the S.S. will look after his wife and children.
During the war Himmler formed a permanent association with a girl called Hedwig who was his personal secretary and by whom in 1942 and 1944 he had two further children, Helge, a son, and Nanette Dorothea, a daughter. Hedwig was the daughter of a regular soldier, who had been at the time of her birth in 1912 a sergeant-major in the German Army. In 1936 she was awarded the standard sports certificate, the Deutsches Sportabzeichen, for her achievements in swimming, running and jumping. Nevertheless, researches into her ‘Aryan’ ancestry were initiated and continued into the years of the war.20
In spite of the fact that in 1937 Himmler solemnly went through the routine of qualifying for his own S.S. sports badge, forcing his inadequate body to run and to jump until he was persuaded by his adjutants that he had reached the necessary standards, his health was far from good.21 He had been suffering from acute headaches for some years, and his congenitally weak constitution produced stomachcramps, the intensity of which was increased by nervous tension resulting from continued worry over his responsibilities. He feared he might be developing cancer, the disease from which his father died.22 It was Wolff who, knowing his suspicion of orthodox treatment, persuaded him in 1934 to undergo massage, and Franz Setzkorn, a nature healer, was called in to soothe away the pain. It was not until 1939 that a man was found who was able to bring more lasting relief to the strained nerves which made Himmler’s stomach twist with cramp and his head feel like a ball of fire. This was Felix Kersten, the cosmopolitan Finnish masseur whose second home before the war was in Holland. Kersten’s reputation for alleviating nervous pains had enabled him to maintain a lucrative practice in Berlin, near to which he had bought a country estate in 1934 called Hartzwalde. At this stage, however, they had not met.
In the middle of January 1937 Himmler was once more invited to address officers of the Wehrmacht during a course of political instruction designed to prepare them for the war which Hitler had decided was inevitable.23 He did not spare them the detailed explanation of his views. He began by tracing the history of the S.S. from its original formation in 1923 as shock troops to support Hitler, and its reformation in 1925 in squadrons set up in various cities to patrol meetings. But from these small beginnings, said Himmler, the noble ideal of an elite corps had sprung. ‘I am a strong believer in the doctrine that, in the end, only good blood can achieve the greatest, most enduring things in the world’, said Himmler. In recruiting his S.S. men:
‘only good blood, Nordic blood, can be considered. I said to myself that should I succeed in selecting as many men as possible from the German people, a majority of whom possess this valued blood, and teach them military discipline and, in time, the understanding of the value of blood and the entire ideology that results from it, then it will be possible actually to create such an elite organization which would successfully hold its own in all cases of emergency.’
For this reason, Himmler continued, very exacting standards were set for the recruiting of the S.S., including a minimum height, 1·7 metres, and the careful examination of portrait photographs by Himmler himself, who was determined to detect ‘traits of foreign blood, excessive cheek-bones’. Special burdens were placed on those selected — ‘valuable personnel is never trained by means of easy service’ — and in spite of the economic hardships of the time, the S.S. men were expected to provide their own uniforms. Now, in 1937, the ranks of the S.S. stood at 210,000; only one in ten of those who applied to join were accepted. When a young man of, say, eighteen years wanted to become an S.S. man, ‘we ask for the political reputation of his parents, brothers and sisters, the record of his ancestry as far back as 1750… . We ask for a record of hereditary health,’ and for ‘a certificate from the race commission’, which was made up of S.S. leaders, anthropologists and physicians, who conducted a full examination of the candidate. If he was only eighteen, the minimum age for consideration, he spent three months as an applicant, then after taking the oath to the Führer he became a recognized candidate for the S.S., spending a year obtaining his sports diploma and a further two years of military service in the regular Army. He then returned to the S.S. and was ‘with special thoroughness instructed in ideology’, learning among other things about the S.S. marriage law. Then, but only then, according to Himmler, was he finally accepted into the S.S.