The formal acceptance of genocide as Nazi policy did not happen until early in 1941, and was then directly linked in Himmler’s mind with the coming invasion of Russia. But by that time his racial prejudice had found outlets which prepared both him and his agents for the supreme test with which they would be faced in 1941. In October 1939 he was required by Hitler to assist in a nation-wide euthanasia programme for the insane, which by 1941 had led to the ‘mercy-killing’ of some 60,000 German patients in mental institutions. 8 Though the idea was Hitler’s, originating in a scribbled note to Philip Bouhler, the head of the Führer’s Chancellery, the S.S. was responsible for supplying doctors to carry out the task, while Viktor Brack, a friend of the Himmler family and Bouhler’s liaison officer with the Department of Health, was put in charge of the administration. The relatives of the people selected for destruction knew nothing of what was happening, and the notification of the cause of death was falsified. Extermination centres were set up under strict guard, and the S.S. doctors and their nursing and ambulance staff underwent their initial experience of selecting, transporting, gassing and cremating large numbers of helpless people.
The first extermination programme, which was under the medical direction of Karl Brandt, was therefore an arbitrary act by Hitler against the Germans themselves, and was only brought to an end by a telephone call in August 1941 from Hitler to Bouhler after public protests had been made, more particularly by the Churches.9 For once the Führer had been made to think again as the result of public pressure. Himmler himself became increasingly uneasy about the reaction against the mercy-killings, and in December 1940 he expressed this view to Brack. But the euthanasia programme was not stopped until August 1941, when other work was planned for Himmler’s selected medical teams. A much larger extermination programme was beginning by then in Russia. The euthanasia centres were not closed down, but used for the destruction of mental patients from the concentration camps or from among the large numbers of foreign workers brought into Germany. Brack was perfectly prepared to extend the work of euthanasia to extermination of prisoners who were listed as defectives when the point was reached at which there was no difference whatsoever between the operations.
Brandt, questioned in connection with his part in the extermination of the insane at the Doctors’ Trial after the war, said:
‘It may seem to have been inhuman… The underlying motive was the desire to help individuals who could not help themselves… Such considerations cannot be regarded as inhuman. Nor did I ever feel it to be in any degree unethical or immoral… I am convinced that if Hippocrates were alive today he would change the wording of his Oath… in which a doctor is forbidden to administer poison to an invalid even upon demand. He was not in favour of the preservation of life under any circumstances… I do not feel myself to blame. I have a perfectly clear conscience about the part I played in the affair.’10
A second form of experience for Himmler’s doctors began in 1939 when the first recorded medical tests were made involving the use of men in the concentration camps. Liquid war gases, mustard and phosgene, were applied to the skin of selected prisoners and their symptoms were observed and photographed up to the time of death. Reports on their observations were sent by the doctors to Himmler, who ordered further experiments to be carried out on a larger scale. Later, in 1942, there was even to be argument as to whether or not payment should be made for prisoners used in these experiments. One doctor, insulted by this idea, wrote in a report: ‘When I think of our military research work conducted at the concentration camp Dachau, I must praise and call special attention to the generous and understanding way in which our task was furthered there and the co-operation we were given. Payment for prisoners was never discussed. It seems as if at Natzweiler camp they are trying to make as much money as possible out of this matter.’ According to one witness, the subjects suffered such appalling pain ‘one could hardly bear to be near them’. Nevertheless to show their goodwill to the Reichsführer S.S., the prisoners at Buchenwald sent him a valuable Christmas present of a green marble desk set made in the camp sculpture shop, where objets d’art were produced by artist-prisoners for the S.S.
In Himmler’s mind the preservation of life and the administration of death were indivisible. In the same month when the eviction of the Jews started in Poland and the S.S. doctors began killing the insane in Germany, Himmler issued his Lebensborn decree of 28 October 1939, in which he said:
‘Beyond the boundaries of bourgeois laws and customs which may in themselves be necessary, it will now become the great task, even outside the marriage bond, for German women and girls of good blood, not in frivolity but in deep moral earnestness, to become mothers of the children of soldiers going off to war… On the men and women whose place remains at home by order of the state, these times likewise impose more than ever the sacred obligation to become again fathers and mothers of children.’11
Himmler pledged himself and the S.S. to care for all children of pure blood, whether legitimate or not, whose fathers died fighting for Germany. However, he ordered the hanging of a Polish farm labourer for having had sexual relations with a German woman, while women who allowed Polish prisoners or workers sexual liberties were given severe prison sentences. This was race pollution.
Himmler watched over his S.S. organization during the war with all the care of a foster parent. The S.S. were still supposed to rank as an order of chivalry and the officers to behave like knights. In April 1942 Himmler signed an order exhorting his men not to seduce girls out of frivolity and so deprive the nation of potentially fruitful mothers. All seductions were to be reported to him personally. Later, in 1943, he was appalled when he learned there were no less than 244 cases of gonorrhoea in the Leibstandarte S.S. Sepp Dietrich hastened to inform him of other facts, and Himmler was able to write in July about the ‘pleasingly large number of illegitimate children’ in the Leibstandarte. ‘I want the names of all those children as well as of their mothers,’ he added. Pedantic regulations were also compiled to control the conduct of the women serving with the S.S. units; their spare time had to be kept occupied, according to Himmler’s ideas, with healthy sport and cultural opportunities. As for homosexuality among S.S. men, this he regarded as equivalent to sabotage.
In return for loyal and deserving service, Himmler initiated a welfare scheme for his men, giving exactly the same personal attention to the details of individual cases in this field as in any other. Widows of S.S. men with children were pensioned; Himmler did not spare himself in sending numerous comforting letters and even small presents of chocolate to such women and their children. Similar pains were taken to look after men invalided out of the S.S.; details of their health, their diet, their needs poured through the S.S. typewriters; the surviving mass of letters and memoranda often bear the personal comments and initials of the Reichsführer S.S. himself. Like a good headmaster, Himmler gave every teacher on his staff and every boy in his school individual attention as far as was possible, no matter how many hours of work it cost. For example, considerable correspondence passed between Himmler and a Secretary of State in the Ministry of Agriculture as to whether or not his monthly contribution to Lebensborn might be reduced to one mark or not.