In his restricted and very bourgeois world, he remained highly conscious of this link with a royal house. His surroundings, the heavy furniture, the ancestral portraits, the collection of old coins and German antiquities, all reflected his serious and respectable turn of mind and the need he felt to distinguish himself in middle-class society. His father had been a wandering soldier with only meagre resources, but his wife, Anna, who came from Regensburg, had brought him a modest amount of money, since her father was in trade. So it was in a comfortable second-floor flat on the Hildegardstrasse in Munich that Anna Himmler gave birth to her second son on 7 October 1900.1 When their first child, Gebhard, had been born two years earlier, he had been named after his father, but for the second son the special privilege was reserved of being called after no less a person than Prince Heinrich himself, who graciously consented to act as godfather to the child of his old tutor. The draft of a letter dated 13 October 1900 and written in the Professor’s immaculate script with its stiffly sloping loops still survives; in it he expresses the hope that the Prince will honour the family with his presence and partake of a glass of champagne. ‘Our small offspring’, writes the Professor, ‘on the second day of his sojourn on this earth, weighed seven pounds and two hundred grammes.’2
The upbringing of the Himmler brothers — a third son, Ernst, was born in December 1905 — followed the routine of the period. With a schoolmaster for father, the masculine dominance natural in German households was all the more evident in their lives, especially when the boys attended their father’s school in Landshut, the small town to which the family moved in 1913 on the Professor’s appointment to a joint-headmastership.
Landshut is a pleasant place some fifty miles north-east of Munich with the water of the River Isar flowing through its centre. It had a castle and sufficient history to encourage young Heinrich’s growing interest in national tradition and in the ancestral pictures and other mementoes his father collected to show their family’s link with Germany’s past. Professor Himmler did everything he could to encourage serious interests and self-discipline in his sons; he had a willing and assiduous pupil in Heinrich, who always remained devoted to both his parents in his own formal way. He was never to lose touch with them all their lives.
The first personal note by Heinrich to survive is a fragment of a diary he kept during 1910 in Munich. In a typical entry on 22 July he wrote: ‘Took a bath. The thirteenth wedding anniversary of my dear parents.’ It is a diary in which he simply adds up the smaller facts of his life from taking baths to going for walks, and he is careful always to show his respect for adults by entering their correct titles. The impression he gives already is that he has a painstaking primness of nature.3
The sections of Himmler’s early diary that survive increase in length and scale during the later years of his youth, and so reveal more about his mind and character. The principal period they represent includes the first year of the war, when he was a schoolboy of fourteen in Landshut, and the period of his adolescence and young manhood in Munich, when he was from nineteen to twenty-two years of age, and then again when he was twenty-four. The total span of the diary covers ten important and formative years in his life, but the entries themselves are intermittent and survive in notebooks that cover only occasional periods of a few months in any detail. Nevertheless, they are of the greatest interest because they reveal so much of the nature of their author.
Although the war seems at first to have affected life at Landshut very little — Himmler’s diary is full of the records of peaceful walks and church-goings, of working on his stamp collection and doing his homework — it is evident that the war news excited him sufficiently to make him enter up various events which he copied from the newspapers. Occasionally he bursts out into schoolboy slang. He notes on 23 September that Prince Heinrich has written to his father, and that the Prince has been wounded. But the initial German victories fill him with enthusiasm for the war, and on 28 September he says how he and a schoolboy friend ‘would be so happy if we could go and slog it out’ with the English and French. But principally he lives the normal life of a schoolboy — attending Mass, going out with his brothers to visit friends (‘had tea with the Frau President, who was very gracious’), playing games and practising on the piano, for which it seems he had little aptitude. He pours scorn on the grumbling and timid people of Landshut who so dislike the war — ‘all the silly old women and petty bourgeois in Landshut… spread idiotic rumours and are afraid of the Cossacks who, they think, will tear them limb from limb.’ On 29 September he notes that his mother and father went to the railway station to help hand out refreshments to transports of wounded soldiers. ‘The entire station was crowded with inquisitive Landshuters who cut up very rough and even began to fight when bread and water were given to seriously wounded Frenchmen who, after all, since they are prisoners, are worse off than our chaps. We took a walk in town and were frightfully bored.’ On 2 October he is roused to enthusiasm by the mounting statistics of Russian prisoners. ‘They multiply like vermin’, he writes. ‘As for the Landshuters, they are as stupid and chickenhearted as ever.’ ‘Whenever there is talk about our troops retreating, they wet themselves,’ writes Himmler, in an attempt to be vulgar, and he continues the following Sunday, after church, ‘I use dumbbells every day now so as to get more strength.’ On 11 October, a few days after his fourteenth birthday, he refers to an army exercise in his locality, and how he ‘would have loved to join in’.
The diaries of this earlier period already begin to reveal that, in spite of his frequent walks, his swimming, and other exercise, he is constantly complaining of heavy colds and suffering from feverishness and stomach upsets. He seems to have been a diligent, not brilliant, pupil at school; he refers frequently, among other subjects, to history, mathematics, Latin and Greek, and to the homework he has to do. He practised assiduously at the piano, but unlike his elder brother, he had no talent at all as a pianist; it was years, however, before he asked his parents to allow him to give up this impossible task. He was also studying shorthand, and began in 1915 to use it for the entries in his diary. But after September 1915 he seems virtually to have given up the diary until a year after the war, in August 1919, when the entries are suddenly resumed.
To judge from his schoolboy enthusiasm, Himmler’s one idea was to grow up and join the Army. His elder brother became seventeen on 29 July 1915, and Heinrich records how on that very day ‘he enters the Landsturm’, that is, the Reserve Army. ‘Oh, how I wish to be as old as that’, writes Heinrich, ‘and so able to go to the front.’
He had to wait until 1917 before he too could volunteer. The draft of a letter written by his father on 7 July survives to show how he used his influence with the Bavarian royal household to ask that, while his son might be regarded as a future officer-cadet, he should at the same time be allowed to remain at school long enough to matriculate before being conscripted. The application form he filled in, dated 26 June, also survives; this was designed to secure his son’s eventual acceptance for training as an Army officer.
Himmler did not in fact formally matriculate until 18 October 1919, two days before he began the study of agriculture in the Technical High School of the University of Munich. Meanwhile in 1917 he had been called up; he served in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, training at Regensburg, his mother’s home town. Much later, Himmler was to claim that he had led men into action during the First World War,4 but this does not accord with an application for military papers that is still preserved in his own handwriting; this is dated 18 June 1919, and makes it clear that Himmler had been released from the Army on 18 December 1918 without having received the military documents due to him following the completion of a course for officer-cadets in Freising during the summer of 1918, and another as a machine-gunner in Bayreuth during September. He needs these papers, he claims, because he is about to join the Reichswehr, having served meanwhile in the local Landshut Free Corps.