‘Our measures are not really so original. All great nations have used some degree of force or waged war in acquiring their status as a great power, in much the same way as ourselves; the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Poles, to a great extent, too, the English and the Americans. Centuries ago Charlemagne set us the example of resettling an entire people by his action with the Saxons and the Franks, the English with the Irish, the Spaniards with the Moors; and the American method of dealing with their Indians was to evacuate whole races… But we are certainly original in one important point: our measures are the expression of an idea, not the search for any personal advantage or ambition: we desire only the realization on a Germanic basis of a social ideal and the unity of the West. We will clarify the situation at whatever cost. It may take as many as three generations before the West gives its approval to this new order, for which the Waffen S.S. was created.’2
Had Nazi Germany won the war, this would have been the pattern of Europe which Himmler intended to impose by force had he succeeded Hitler as Führer; his aim was for Germany to set up a large economic confederation of European and North African states led by Germany and representing a total population and power three times greater than that of the United States. Kersten carefully recorded Himmler’s statements:
‘The European empire would form a confederation of free states, among which would be Greater Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Holland, Flanders, Wallonia, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. These countries were to govern themselves. They would have in common a European currency, certain areas of the administration including the police, foreign policy and the army in which the various nations would be represented by national formations. Trade relations would be governed by special treaties, a sphere in which Germany as the economically strongest country would hold back in order to favour the development of the weaker ones. Free towns were also envisaged, having special functions of their own, among them the task of representing a nation’s culture …
‘When Bolshevism had been extirpated in Russia, the Western Territories would come under German administration modelled on the Marches which Charlemagne had instituted in the east of his empire; the methods followed would be those by which England had evolved her colonies into dominions. When peace and economic health were fully restored, these territories would be handed back to the Russian people, who would live there in complete freedom, and a twenty-five year peace and commercial treaty would be concluded with the new government.’3
The great expanse of Russia was to be partitioned and placed under the administrative control of Germany, Britain and the United States, after these nations had come to terms with Hitler. Germany would control the area up to the River Ob, while the English were to have the areas between the rivers Ob and Lena. The Americans would be allocated the region east of the Lena and including Kamschatka and the sea of Okhotsh. As Himmler told Kersten early in the war, Germany had no intention of weakening England’s position as a great power. On the contrary, England was to be one of the cornerstones in the new Germanic Europe. The British fleet would protect Europe at sea while the Germanic armies would protect the land. Himmler’s theories, geared only to the past, found difficulty in defining a creative future for America. As Kersten puts it, ‘The whole American way of thinking was so alien to him that he could not even begin to understand it.’
Once Europe had been stabilized as the political, economic and cultural centre of the world, governed by a landed aristocracy and policed by a soldier-peasantry, the spread of the pure Germanic stock by intensive breeding would begin. The germs for this brave Germanic world had already been established in the original S.S. marriage and breeding codes and in the conception of the Lebensborn movement. ‘I regard the S.S. as a tree that I have planted’, said Himmler to Kersten, ‘which has roots deep enough to defy all weathers.’ This élite must be established in every nation capable of producing a pureblooded Nordic stock; where this did not exist, it must be provided by settlements of Nordic immigrants.
Alongside the men, Nordic womanhood was to be developed, the ‘Chosen’, as Himmler called them, ‘the strong, purposeful type of women’, the best of them trained in Women’s Academies for Wisdom and Culture and acting as representatives of Germanic womanhood throughout the world. The true Nordic woman would be willing to be directed into a suitable marriage designed to promote the ideal growth of the human race. Himmler maintained ‘that men could be bred just as successfully as animals and that a race of men could be created possessing the highest spiritual, intellectual and physical qualities.’ When he saw blond children, says Kersten, ‘he became pale with emotion’.
As the best of Germany’s manhood was dying at the front, both Hitler and Himmler agreed that a stand must be made after the war to change the marriage laws and introduce legalized bigamy. The good stock so cruelly lost in war must at all costs be replaced.
‘My personal opinion’, said Himmler to Kersten in May 1943, ‘is that it would be a natural development for us to break with monogamy. Marriage in its existing form is the Catholic Church’s satanic achievement; marriage laws are in themselves immoral… . With bigamy each wife would act as a stimulus to the other so that both would try to be their husband’s dream-woman — no more untidy hair, no more slovenliness. Their models, which will intensify these reflections, will be the ideals of beauty projected by art and the cinema.’
Himmler’s open and happy relationship with Hedwig, who at the time he was talking to Kersten on this subject had already borne him one child and was soon to become pregnant with her second, no doubt encouraged him to regard bigamy in a favourable light, both personally and politically. He loved to enlarge on this dream of multiple family life:
‘The fact that a man has to spend his entire existence with one wife drives him first of all to deceive her and then makes him a hypocrite as he tries to cover it up. The result is indifference between the partners. They avoid each other’s embraces and the final consequence is that they don’t produce children. This is the reason why millions of children are never born, children whom the state urgently requires. On the other hand the husband never dares to have children by the woman with whom he is carrying on an affair, much though he would like to, simply because middle-class morality forbids it. Again it’s the state which loses, for it gets no children from the second woman either.’4
He attacked fiercely the fact that illegitimate children were denied the full rights due to them as their father’s offspring, and the social disgrace the unmarried mother had to endure seemed to him intolerable:
‘A man in this situation has no access to his child. He’s up against the law again if he wants to adopt the child, so long as he has children of his own or even has the possibility of having them. In other words, the law is in direct contradiction to our crying need — children and still more children. We must show courage and act decisively in this matter, even if it means arousing still greater opposition from the Church — a little more or less is of no consequence.’5
His rooted objection to homosexuality among S.S. men invariably led to habitual offenders being confined in concentration camps. The homosexual was only useful in a degenerate society where breeding was to be discouraged. A Nordic homosexual was ‘a traitor to his own people’, and he refused to listen to Kersten’s advocacy of psychiatric treatment for men with homosexual tendencies who were capable of redirection to normal sexual relations. Particular trouble arose over one dedicated officer who was discovered in 1940 to be advocating the formation of a homosexual élite within the S.S.; Himmler was horrified and prevailed on Kersten to interview the man and report on his case.