Himmler’s hostility to the Christian religion, and especially to the Catholic Church, led him to make his own particular form of study of other religions. This again drew him back into the past. He liked occasionally to entertain German scholars and challenge them with his ideas. He enjoyed discussion and friendly controversy, and he was not bigoted enough to refuse Gudrun, his daughter, her right to say Christian Grace before meals. He searched the sacred books of other faiths for ideas which would support his own acquired beliefs. He studied the Bhagavad-gita (which he particularly admired, observed Kersten, for its ‘great Aryan qualities’) and the books of the Hindu and Buddhist creeds, while his interest in astrology was well-known.
When Kersten, who was himself interested in comparative religion, asked him in the summer of 1942 whether he had any religious belief at all, Himmler was indignant that Kersten should even doubt that he had. It was only common sense, he said, to believe:
‘that some higher Being — whether you call it God or Providence or anything else you like — is behind nature and the marvellous order in the world of man and animals and plants. If we refused to recognize that we should be no better than the Marxists… I insist that members of the S.S. must believe in God. I’m not going to have men around me who refuse to recognize any higher Being or Providence or whatever you like to call it.’
He longed, he said, to be Minister for Religious Matters and ‘dedicate myself to positive achievements only… Of course it’s pleasanter to concern yourself with flower-beds rather than political dust-heaps and refuse-dumps, but flowers themselves won’t thrive unless these things are seen to’. He spoke of the Gestapo as ‘the national charwoman’, cleaning up the state. Meanwhile, he took the Bhagavad-gita to bed with him; it gave him comfort to read this: ‘It is decreed that whenever men lose their respect for law and truth, and the world is given over to injustice, I will be born anew.’ That, he said, ‘was absolutely made for the Führer… It has been ordained by the Karma of the Germanic world that he should wage war against the East and save the Germanic peoples.’ In his more colourful and sentimental moments he saw Hitler, like the notorious picture postcard of the Führer, as a saint in armour whose head was haloed with light, a throw-back to the legendary Knights of the Holy Grail and the story of Parsifal. As for Himmler, he was proud to associate himself with the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, on whom he tried to model himself. Yet in spite of his hostility to the Catholic Church, he foresaw the elevation of the Führers of the future through a system of election similar to that used in electing the Pope.6
Kersten studied Himmler’s character closely with the intention of controlling him in so far as he could, and began to introduce the question of the Jews into their discussions. Himmler was quite prepared to discuss this subject in the same way as he discussed any other, with an apparent rationality which soon became irrational. Just as the growth of freemasonry was obnoxious in a healthy nation because it represented a powerful, self-seeking secret society intent on spreading its own power and influence inside the State, so the development of powerful Jewish interests in Germany seemed to Himmler like a cancerous growth that had spread its parasitic network through the natural economy of the land. This conception of the alien Jew sapping the vitality of the German nation had become an obsession with Himmler, as with all the more bigoted Nazis. None of Kersten’s arguments, which Himmler was quite prepared to hear, moved him in the slightest from this predetermined and irrational obsession. He could not tolerate what he regarded as Jewish infiltration into the German economy and culture entirely for racial and political ends. The two races, the two worlds, he said, could never mingle; they must be separated by force before further irreparable harm was done.
It was this obsession, combined with his academic passion for ‘neatness’, that converted Himmler from the idea of the expulsion of the Jews from the Germanic territories and made him favour their absolute destruction through genocide.
Himmler was a man of violence, not by nature, but by conviction. Although, like Kersten, he took part in hunting as a manly sport, he was a poor shot, and he could never understand Kersten’s passion for deer-stalking. ‘How can you find any pleasure, Herr Kersten,’ said Himmler, ‘in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood… Properly considered, it’s pure murder.’
He practised hunting, however, because it was a traditional Germanic sport, and because the game must be ‘kept within bounds’. But he despised the theatrical sportsman, like Goring, who turned hunting into an egotistical cult. Children, he believed, should be brought up to love animals, not to kill them merely for sport.
The destruction of human beings, who were themselves so much more destructive than the animals, was in fact forced on Himmler, and he accepted this fearful task because he believed it to be the only, as well as the ‘final’, solution to the problem of securing the racial purification of Germany which remained his deep-rooted ideal. Belief in the maintenance of racial purity in the modern world, if it is to be carried to its logical conclusion, must lead either to complete segregation or to genocide. Himmler, in the circumstances of total war, came to accept genocide as the only solution. The primitive hatred and fear from which such absolute ideas originate forced Himmler, who was neither primitive nor passionate by nature, to take the supreme crime of mass murder upon his uneasy conscience.
Kersten discovered what was affecting his patient as early as November 1941: ‘After much pressure… he told me that the destruction of the Jews is being planned.’
The admission put Kersten himself in a position of responsibility for which he was utterly unprepared. So far he had managed to persuade Himmler to release a few men from imprisonment as a personal favour to himself. The problem which he faced now was crime on a scale he did not know how to approach; he could only react at once against the raw fact that Himmler had unwillingly revealed to him:
‘Filled with horror, I emphatically begged Himmler to give up this idea and the plan to be discerned behind it. The suffering and counter-suffering were not to be contemplated. To this Himmler answered that he knew it would mean much suffering for the Jews. But what had the Americans done earlier? They had exterminated the Indians — who only wanted to go on living in their native land — in the most abominable way. “It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life. Yet we must create new life, we must cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”’7
Himmler spoke of the Jewish concept of ‘atonement’ and the Jewish saying of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Had not the Jews been responsible, he argued, for millions of dead in building up their empire?
Himmler took his own time to adjust the necessity for genocide to his code of morality. He did so deliberately and painfully. As he said to Kersten, ‘It’s the old tragic conflict between will and obligation. At this moment I am learning how terrible it can be… The extermination of people is unGermanic. You can demand everything from me, even pity. But you cannot demand protection for organized nihilism. That would be suicide.’