But by the time Schellenberg eventually reached Stockholm, the time-limit for discussions set by Hewitt had elapsed; he had gone back to America. A remote chance to bring about peace had been thrown away; how far deliberately, how far through Himmler’s chronic procrastination it is now impossible to determine.
During 1943 Himmler began to extend his military ambitions. The fall of Stalingrad followed by reverses in North Africa led Hitler to revoke his ban on the expansion of the Waffen S.S. His total losses in Russia and Africa amounted to over half a million men. After Khahov was recaptured by the Germans in the spring, Himmler, as we have seen, spoke there in the University about the foreign recruits his S.S. men would soon find fighting beside them. Eight new divisions were formed during 1943, half of them recruited from East Europeans of whom by no means all were of German racial origin. All Rumanians of German origin were subject to conscription, to the resentment of the Rumanian Army; many of them were sent to replenish S.S. divisions elsewhere in Europe, where they were not popular. Even Bosnian Moslems were recruited, and in May Himmler made the Mufti Hajji Iman an honorary S.S. Lieutenant-General. Obviously all former S.S. standards had gone by the board, and in the same month recruitment began for an S.S. division made up of anti-Bolshevist Ukrainians, who formed part of the vast body of men numbering over half a million who had been former subjects of the Soviet Union and whom the Germans persuaded to serve in their own armies. Himmler still endeavoured to maintain his racial prejudice in the face of this rapid expansion of his forces, since he regarded all Slavs as inferior, but he welcomed into his ranks the Asiatic stock he associated with Genghis Khan. Other divisions were formed in Latvia and Estonia. By the end of the war, the number of S.S. divisions was to increase to thirty-five, representing some half a million fighting men. Allowing for losses, the numbers involved were some 900,000; of these less than half came from Germany itself, and some 150,000 were men whose racial origins were not Germanic.22
Although the eight months from January to 25 August 1943, when Himmler became Reich Minister of the Interior following the downfall of Mussolini and the defection of Italy, represent a period during which he had to regain the confidence of Hitler after the misunderstanding over the escape of Horia Sima — ‘a considerable time’, says Schellenberg — they were months in which Himmler’s powers outside Hitler’s court considerably increased. Although, according to Reitlinger, Himmler had no direct access to Hitler, who was spending the greater part of his time at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters at Rastenburg, this does not mean he was out of touch with him. There was, however, a continuous struggle between him and Bormann for influence over Hitler, though each of them knew better than to bring the fight into the open. According to Schellenberg, who hated Bormann — ‘the contrast between him and Himmler is really grotesque; if I thought of Himmler as a stork in a lily-pond, Bormann seemed to me like a pig in a potato-field’ — Himmler made many tactical errors in his dealings with Bormann, which the latter merely exploited at Himmler’s expense; one of these errors was the secret loan through Bormann of 80,000 marks from Party funds to help provide for the needs of his mistress Hedwig and their children.
After April 1943, when he was appointed Hitler’s personal secretary, Bormann increasingly governed Hitler’s daily life; he became an indispensable companion, sharing his worries, soothing his nerves, using his ‘cast-iron memory’ to clarify the growing complexity of Hitler’s war situation and guide his decisions. As Himmler said to Schellenberg:
‘The Führer has become so accustomed to Bormann that it’s very difficult indeed to lessen his influence. Again and again I have had to come to terms with him, though it’s really my duty to get him out. I hope I can succeed in out-manoeuvring him without having to get rid of him. He’s been responsible for many of the Führer’s misguided decisions; in fact, he’s not only confirmed his uncompromising attitude, he’s stiffened it.’23
Schellenberg positively enjoyed embarrassing his master, and continued throughout 1943 to remind him of his promise to remove Ribbentrop:
‘Because of the reflection of Himmler’s glasses, I could scarcely ever see his eyes… I had therefore made a habit of always staring at his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose, and this seemed to make him strangely uneasy after a few minutes. He would start to make notes or look into the drawer of his desk in order to escape my glance. On this occasion… he said, “I can only remove Ribbentrop with Bormann’s help, and the result would be an even more radical policy.”’
Goebbels, who had personal discussions with Goring in March 1943 in the hope that some sort of group representation of the old leaders could be formed to counteract the bad influence of Bormann, Ribbentrop, Lammers and Keitel, regarded Himmler as at least a potential ally; the theory was that Goring, roused from his lassitude, should reconvene the pre-war Council of Ministers, of which he was President, and through this set up an opposing factor with Goebbels, Himmler, Speer and Ley. In May Goebbels preens himself in his diary about the praise Himmler had given to his department and agrees with his stringent criticisms of Frick, the Minister of the Interior, whose lack of leadership he deplored. On the other hand, Semmler, Goebbels’s aide who kept his own diary at this time, recorded in March that Goebbels was equally suspicious of Himmler and Bormann — ‘not one of those three trusts the others out of his sight’.
Not that Bormann was unfriendly to Himmler’s face; he merely placed himself firmly between the Führer and Himmler, whose field headquarters in Birkenwald, East Prussia, were some thirty miles distant from the Wolf’s Lair. To Bormann (whose father had once been a bandsman who, according to Ribbentrop, had often performed on the bandstands on English sea-fronts in the years before 1914), Himmler was always ‘Uncle Heinrich’. As Party Chancellor, controlling the whole national Party machine, Bormann could do much in a quiet way to frustrate the influence of men as uniquely powerful as Goebbels and Himmler were to become between 1943 and the end of the war.
Himmler meanwhile built up a vast bureaucracy of his own; in addition to the Waffen S.S. in the field, some 40,000 men were employed by the S.S. leadership office, while the Reich Main Security Office had a strength of over 60,000. When S.S. General Heinz Guderian, the expert on armoured warfare who had been reinstated by Hitler after temporary dismissal and made Chief Inspector for Panzer Troops, met Himmler on 11 April at Berchtesgaden, he found him completely opposed to any integration of the new S.S. armoured divisions with the Army. Neither Hitler nor Himmler wanted to see the S.S., the personal army of the leadership, merged with the armed forces of the Reich. Nor could he persuade Himmler to influence Hitler in the direction of delegating more power to the Army; he ‘received an impression of such impenetrable obliquity’ that he gave up any thought of ‘discussing a limitation of Hitler’s power with him’.
Parallel with his extension of the Waffen S.S., Himmler turned his eyes in another direction that might assist his future powers. In April 1943 he visited the rocket establishment at Peenemünde for the first time, and met the scientist and soldier in charge of the research and development of liquid-propellant rockets, Major-General Walter Dornberger. The first experimental rocket of the pattern later known as the V2 had been successfully launched as early as October 1942, and Himmler was anxious to know more of this carefully-guarded secret weapon, for the development of which Hitler had not yet given full priority.24 Dornberger describes Himmler’s manner and appearance: