Later in the speech he made a statement which was to be the most open expression of his determination to eliminate the European Jews who lay in his power that he was ever to make at a formal conference. The ambiguous terminology of genocide — the ‘final solution’, the ‘special treatment’, the ‘night and fog’ symbolism8 — were for once set aside, and the fanatic exterminator was revealed through Himmler’s own words:
‘Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly — but we will never speak of it publicly — just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934 to do the duty we were told to do and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of this… I mean cleaning out the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It is one of those things it’s easy to talk about — “The Jewish race is being exterminated… it’s our programme, and we’re doing it.” And then they come, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one of them has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this particular Jew is a first-rate man… Most of you must know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time (apart from exceptions caused by human weakness) to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us so hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and will never be written.
‘We are a product of the law of selection. We have made our choice from a cross-section of our people. This people came into being aeons ago, through generations and centuries…
‘Alien peoples have swept over this people and left their heritage behind them,… but it has… still has the strength in the very essence of its blood to win through. This whole people is… held together by Nordic-Phalian-Germanic blood… The moment we forget the law which is the foundation of our race, and the law of selection and austerity towards ourselves, we shall have the germ of death in us… We must remember our principle: blood, selection, austerity.’
At another conference that took place earlier the same year, in April at the University of Khahov, Himmler addressed a similar audience made up of the commanding officers of the S.S. divisions serving in Russia. To them he spoke of ‘the great fortress of Europe’ they were privileged to defend and increase. ‘It is here in the East that the decision lies; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield, and one by one they must be made to bleed to death … Either they must be deported and used on labour in Germany for Germany, or they will just die in battle.’
Then he referred to the task of extermination which, he said, ‘is exactly the same as de-lousing; getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. We shall soon be de-loused.’ The need of the future was to incorporate all the Nordic peoples into the Germanic Reich. ‘I very soon formed a Germanic S.S. in the various countries’, he said, referring particularly to Flanders and the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark. ‘We very soon got Germanic volunteers from them’, whether the leaders in these countries liked it or not. He asked his officers to tolerate the ignorance of the German language in those of German race whom he incorporated into the S.S.; they must assist the newcomers to learn the language. One day, he forecast, he would bring together the mass of German stock from all over the world, ‘still more of those overseas, in America, whom one day we must fetch here by the million… We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.’
At Posen, he also looked into the future; he spoke with the burning tongue of the prophet to men who listened uneasily to dreams in which few of them had any faith and which they regarded as superfluous at this critical stage in the war. They were beginning to realize, after the retreat in North Africa in 1942, the fall of Stalingrad the following January, the collapse of Mussolini and the Allied invasion of Italy that had just begun, that this had developed into a war which would be increasingly difficult to win. But Himmler’s voice went on relentlessly: ‘If the peace is a final one, we shall be able to tackle our great work of the future. We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our young men with the laws of the S.S. organization… It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial superstratum of the Germanic people. In twenty or thirty years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its ruling class.’ He had, he said, asked the Führer on behalf of the S.S. for the privilege of holding Germany’s frontier furthest to the East: ‘We shall impose our laws on the East. We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.’ This would keep the S.S. hard; death would always remain a possibility facing an S.S. man.
‘In this way we will create the necessary conditions for the whole Germanic people and the whole of Europe, controlled, ordered and led by us, the Germanic people. We must be able, in future generations, to stand the test in our battle of destiny against Asia, which will certainly break out again… It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive. It would be the end of beauty and Kultur, of the creative power of this earth… Now let us remember the Führer, Adolf Hitler, who will create the Germanic Reich and will lead us into the Germanic future.’
Himmler’s determination to win his own peculiar version of the war was never stronger than during this period. He was hardened by many events, the reversals of the war, the death of Heydrich, the great challenge to his authority made by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, the revolt of the students at Munich, and the Communist conspiracy in Germany of the Red Orchestra, the Rote Kapelle.
The Rote Kapelle was the name given to a network of German spies serving the Russians; many of its agents were discovered to be Germans from well-connected families, and many were working in the various Ministries. Their leader, Harold Schulze-Boysen, an unstable man who had been a poet and left-wing revolutionary in the nineteen-twenties, was working during the war in a department of Göring’s Air Ministry which specialized in ‘research’ through telephone-tapping. This was a department which naturally enough had excited Himmler’s suspicion.
Schellenberg was sent in March 1942 to Carinhall, Goring’s luxurious country mansion to which the leader of the Luftwaffe retired increasingly to avoid the consequence of his lost authority. He came to ask Goring to permit this work to be taken over by the S.D. Goring, according to Schellenberg, received him dressed in a toga but carrying his marshal’s baton; fingering jewels in a cut-glass bowl, he went into a trance and managed to avoid reaching any decision likely to satisfy Himmler. The Reichsführer immediately made Göring’s department the subject of an enquiry, which according to one observer was stopped by Hitler in July to avoid a public scandal. Goring hoped to close the matter amicably by giving Himmler honorary flier’s wings in August, but this was the month in which the whole network of the Rote Kapelle came to light through the independent investigations conducted by Admiral Canaris’s Military Intelligence department, the Abwehr, though the actual arrests of over a hundred agents were eventually undertaken by combined units made up of Canaris’s Field Police and the Gestapo. In spite of the fact that the Gestapo was permitted by Hitler to prepare criminal proceedings, Himmler realized that his vast organization had failed to be the first to uncover the Rote Kapelle, the existence of which caused a scandal far exceeding the actual importance of this spying organization. Schellenberg in his Memoirs is careful to take the main credit for uncovering the conspiracy for himself and, as always, presents the story in its most colourful form.