‘He looked to me like an intelligent elementary school teacher, certainly not a man of violence… Under a brow of average height two grey-blue eyes looked at me, behind glittering pince-nez, with an air of peaceful interrogation. The trimmed moustache below the straight, well-shaped nose traced a dark line on his unhealthy pale features. The lips were colourless and very thin. Only the inconspicuous receding chin surprised me. The skin of his neck was flaccid and wrinkled. With a broadening of his constant set smile, faintly mocking and sometimes contemptuous about the corners of the mouth, two rows of excellent white teeth appeared between the thin lips. His slender, pale and almost girlishly soft hands, covered with veins, lay motionless on the table throughout our conversation.’
Dornberger soon discovered the nature of Himmler’s interest.
‘I am here to protect you against sabotage and treason’, he said. Peenemünde was too much in the limelight; its security had become of national importance, and not merely the concern of the Army, under which its activities were formally placed. As he left, Himmler promised Dornberger that he would come back for further private discussions.
‘I am extremely interested in your work’, he said. ‘I may be able to help you.’
The infiltration of the S.S. into the work at Peenemünde followed immediately on this meeting. Dornberger’s Station Commander, Colonel Zanssen, an experienced man who had been at Peenemünde for some years, was suddenly dismissed without any reference to the Army departments concerned. This was done by order of Himmler on the most trivial charges, which the S.S. refused to authenticate. Dornberger managed to have Zanssen reinstated with the support of General Fromm, the Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army under whose command Peenemünde was placed. After the war, Dornberger learned that Professor von Braun, who was then one of the senior research officers at the establishment, had under an oath of secrecy been offered by Himmler full scope to develop Peenemünde if the S.S. ever took over. Von Braun had rejected the offer.
Himmler’s second visit came on 29 June; he arrived driving his own small armoured car. As usual, he made a better impression in private than he did in public. Dornberger describes him at a meeting with the senior research workers:
‘Himmler possessed the rare gift of attentive listening. Sitting back with legs crossed, he wore throughout the same amiable and interested expression. His questions showed that he unerringly grasped what the technicians told him out of the wealth of their knowledge. The talk turned to the war and the important questions in all our minds. He answered without hesitation, calmly and candidly. It was only at rare moments that, sitting with his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, he emphasized his words by tapping the tips of his fingers together. He was a man of quiet, unemotional gestures. A man without nerves.’
He seemed happy to talk politics in this group of men whose interests were absorbed in science and engineering. He spoke of Europe as a social and economic unit controlled by a racially-sound Germany which had come to an understanding with Britain, whose main interests lay overseas and with America. The Slav block was the great danger to Europe, and that was why Hitler had gone to war with Russia before the Slav nations had been welded into one invincible group under Russian domination. He compared the Western European worker, with his demand for leisure and a high standard of living, with the Russian worker, dedicated entirely to his factory’s output and ready in time to flood world markets with cheap goods. The war was therefore just as much an economic struggle as it was military and political. They argued about the German occupation of Poland — ‘Himmler’s glasses glittered. Was I mistaken,’ wrote Dornberger, ‘or had his imperturbable, impenetrable mask of amiability fallen a little?’ Poland was needed for German colonization, he said. The birth-rate of the Poles would have to be reduced until the German settlers grew sufficient in numbers to take over the territory. ‘We shall arrange for the young German peasants to marry Ukrainian girls of good farming stock and found a healthy new generation adapted to conditions out there… We must practice a rigid state-planned economy both with men and material throughout conquered territory’, he added.
Dornberger and his colleagues sat both fascinated and revolted by Himmler’s manner of presenting his policy, which he expressed so ‘concisely, simply and naturally’. ‘I shuddered at the everyday manner in which the stuff was related. But even as I did so I admired Himmler’s gift for expounding difficult problems in a few words which could be understood by anyone and went straight to the heart of the matter.’
Himmler then went on to praise Stalin who, he said, Hitler considered to be his only really great adversary, and Genghis Khan, who had tried in his period to consolidate Mongol supremacy in Asia and whose blood survived in the modern ruler of Russia. They could only be conquered by the methods they understood — those practised by Genghis Khan.
They talked until four o’clock in the morning. Himmler knew the calibre of the men he was with, and that he could best appeal to them by intellectual discussion. This was conquest by the spoken word.
The following afternoon Himmler saw a successful launching of a ‘V2’ rocket, and he went away determined to win control of Peenemünde from the Army.
Meanwhile, in August 1943 Langbehn consented to bring a key member of one section of the German resistance movement to see Himmler. This was Dr Johannes Popitz, a scholar and an intellectual belonging to Hassell’s circle, and a man of whom Goebbels was to record his grave suspicion less than a month later. ‘Hitler’, wrote Goebbels in his diary, ‘is absolutely convinced that Popitz is our enemy. He is already having him watched so as to have incriminating material about him ready; the moment Popitz gives himself away, he will close in on him.’
In tracing the devious relations between Himmler, Langbehn and Popitz, it is impossible to know every aspect of Himmler’s motives, though it is, of course, easy to speculate about them. Schellenberg, whom, as we have seen, Himmler had instructed to put out peace feelers to the Allies through Langbehn, makes no mention of Popitz in his published memoirs. Although Hassell was always doubtful about the usefulness of Himmler in any conspiracy directed solely against Hitler, there was a period when Popitz, as a member of Hassell’s aristocratic circle of conspirators, managed to convince them that a risk should be taken to sound out Himmler’s loyalty. In this he was encouraged by his friend Langbehn.
It must be remembered that the conspirators were by 1943 in a state of considerable frustration; no progress seemed to have been made to bring in the Army and the generals. There had since 1941 been desultory discussion of the idea of stimulating a ‘palace revolution’, at first through Goring and then later through Himmler, either of whom could at a later stage be removed from power once he had fulfilled his initial task in assisting with the removal of Hitler.
Langbehn was the obvious man through whom Popitz could be introduced to Himmler. According to the evidence in the indictment used at their trial in 1944, they had first met during the winter of 1941-2, shortly after Langbehn had joined the circle round Hassell. Popitz is another curious figure whose actual position it is difficult to determine; he was not a member of the Nazi Party but remained from 1933 until his arrest in 1944 Prussian Minister of State and Finance under Goring. He had been a friend of Schleicher, and it was probably at the time of Schleicher’s murder by the Nazis in 1934 that he began to entertain the doubts that eventually made him one of the more ardent members of the resistance. The fact that he had once been a supporter of the Nazis and as late as 1937 accepted the golden badge of the Party from Hitler made him suspect in the eyes of many members of the resistance. Also he was politically very right-wing and favoured a return of the monarchy. But Hassell trusted him as a friend and fellow-conspirator, and it was decided by May 1943 that Langbehn should seek an appointment for Popitz with Himmler through the agency of Wolff. The arrangements were delayed owing to Wolff’s illness during the summer, but eventually the meeting took place in Himmler’s new office at the Ministry of the Interior on 26 August 1943.