Von Hassell was hanged on 8 September 1944, Langbehn executed on 12 October, Popitz hanged on 2 February 1945, Nebe of the S.S. executed on 3 March. Rommel, Hitler’s and Germany’s ideal general, was compelled to commit suicide on 14 October. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on 9 April, the same day as Admiral Canaris.
Himmler made his first public comment on the events of 20 July in an address to a group of Gauleiters and other officials assembled at Posen on 3 August; both Bormann and Goebbels were present. He spoke with a scathing, self-protecting irony of what had happened between himself, Langbehn, whom he called the middleman, and Popitz:
‘We let this middleman chatter, we let him talk, and this is more or less what he said: Yes, it was of course necessary that the war should end, we must come to peace terms with England — following the opinion of the day — and the first requisite is that the Führer must be removed at once and relegated by the opposition to an honorary president’s place. His group was quite certain that no action of this kind be carried out against the S.S.’
He had told Hitler of the matter, and they had laughed together; the appointment with Popitz, however, had not been very revealing. So Langbehn was arrested:
‘At last I pulled in the middleman. Since that time, nine months ago, Herr Popitz looks like a cheese. When you watch him, he is as white as a wall; I should call him the living image of a guilty conscience. He sends me telegrams, he telephones me, he asks what is the matter with Dr X, what has happened to him; and I give him sphinx-like replies so that he does not know whether I had anything to do with what happened or not.’4
Himmler, as might be expected, poured ridicule on the whole civilian part in the conspiracy, from Langbehn and Popitz to Kiep and the Solfs. ‘We knew about the present conspiracy for a very long time’, he said. As for the generals, he was equally scathing, ‘Fromm’, he declared, ‘acted like a vulgar film scenario’, and he made the whole Army seem responsible for the conspiracy. He claimed that Stauffenberg was preparing to loose the inmates of the concentration camps upon the people of Germany. ‘It meant that in the next two or three weeks crime would blossom and the communists would reign over our streets.’5
These words were meant for public hearing. In private, Himmler was most careful to ensure that the trial of Langbehn and Popitz was kept as secret as possible. When the hearing occurred in the autumn, Kaltenbrunner sent a letter to the Minister of Justice:
‘I understand that the trial of the former minister Popitz and the lawyer Langbehn is to take place shortly before the Peoples’ Court. In view of the facts known to you, namely the conference of the Reichsführer S.S. with Popitz, I ask you to see to it that the public be excluded from the trial. I assume your agreement and I shall dispatch about ten of my collaborators to make up an audience.’6
Though both Langbehn and Popitz were condemned to death, Popitz was kept alive until the following February in case more information could be got from him. Langbehn, as we have seen, died in October; he was tortured before the death sentence was carried out.
In his talk to the Gauleiters and other high officials at Posen, on 29 May 1944, Himmler was unusually direct in his reference to the Judenfrage, the Jewish problem. He adopted the frank manner of speech he favoured with his more intimate audiences, the audiences in fact that he most enjoyed addressing. Extermination, he explained, was a hard and difficult operation:
‘Now I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say here in this select gathering, but never to mention it to anybody. We had to deal with the question: what about the women and children? — I am determined in this matter to come to an absolutely clear-cut solution. I would not feel entitled merely to root out the men — well, let’s call a spade a spade, for “root out” say kill or cause to be killed — well I just couldn’t risk merely killing the man and allowing the children to grow up as avengers facing our sons and grandsons. We were forced to come to the grim decision that this people must be made to disappear from the face of the earth. To organize this assignment was our most difficult task yet. But we have tackled it and carried it through, without — I hope, gentlemen, I may say this — without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and souls. That danger was considerable, for there was only a narrow path between the Scylla and Charybdis of their becoming either heartless ruffians unable any longer to treasure human life, or becoming soft and suffering nervous breakdowns.’
He promised the Gauleiters, whom he called ‘the supreme dignitaries of the Party, of this political Order of ours’, that ‘before the end of the year the Jew problem will be settled once and for all.’ He concluded:
‘That’s about all I want to say at the moment about the Jew problem. You know all about it now, and you had better keep it to yourselves. Perhaps at some later, some very much later, period we might consider whether to tell the German people a little more about all this. But I think we had better not! It’s us here who have shouldered the responsibility, the responsibility for action as well as for an idea, and I think we had better take this secret with us into our graves.’
Nineteen forty-four was the year in which Himmler established his highest prestige with Hitler and finally won from him a command on the battlefield in addition to control of the Reserve Army and the Waffen S.S. Yet he was realistic enough at the same time to modify his position over the Jews. There were many practical reasons for this. The machinery of slaughter was becoming increasingly difficult to operate now that the adversities of war were gathering momentum. By the spring of 1944 it was conceivable that areas such as Auschwitz might eventually be overrun by the enemy; with the heavy losses of men and equipment the attempts to mobilize the labour of the prisoners became more urgent. At the same time, an increasing pressure was being brought to bear on Himmler to relent, and this matched a growing fear in his own mind that the revulsion of the world outside Germany to the genocide associated most directly with his name would tell against him if he were ever able to put himself forward as Germany’s negotiator with the Allies in the West.
Himmler never understood the nature of the abhorrence in which his name was held, nor realized the extent of it. He believed that a few apparent gestures of goodwill would be sufficient to re-establish his unfortunate reputation in the West, though the announcements made in America during the summer that there would be trials for war crimes once hostilities were over must have reached his ears.
Himmler began to think again. The constant humanizing influence of Kersten and the intrigues of Schellenberg designed to edge his master into becoming a peace negotiator, combined to make Himmler retreat to some extent from the absolute position he had held in 1943. The first change of policy was, as we have seen, second only to genocide itself in its inhumanity — extermination of unwanted peoples through work. Then came the attempted sale of certain Jews, negotiated on the one side in order to save lives and on the other to gain either money or commodities useful for the war.7 The first important negotiations of this kind were those undertaken by Yoel Brand on behalf of the Hungarian Jews, whom the Nazis had finally succeeded in adding to their victims in 1943. In May 1944 Eichmann offered Brand the lives of 700,000 Hungarian Jews in exchange for 10,000 lorries which the Allies were to deliver to Salonika; this was the first form of barter to be suggested and came to nothing. It was to be followed by other proposals equally appalling, such as Eichmann’s subsequent offer on behalf of Himmler to receive 20 million Swiss francs for the lives and liberties of 30,000 Jews. This last proposal led to the actual transfer of 1,684 Rumanian Jews, who reached Switzerland in August and December 1944, and a further 1,000 Hungarian Jews the following February, for all of whom Himmler received through the Swiss President, Jean-Marie Musi, 5 million Swiss francs subscribed through international Jewish charity. These developments were assisted by the proposals Himmler received from a Madame Immfeld to settle liberated Jews in the South of France. The negotiations for the transfer of the money were most complicated and were in fact hindered by the action of the U.S. State Department. Information about this pitiful sale was eventually to reach the ears of Hitler. But by this time, as we shall see, Himmler was deeply involved in negotiations with the Red Cross.