Kersten, who was to leave Germany for Stockholm on 22 March, had now worked Himmler into a pliant mood. In his very full diary for this period, written mainly at Hartzwalde, his old residence near Berlin, Kersten claims that he had managed to persuade Himmler to agree that there should be no fighting in Scandinavia, and also to countermand Hitler’s order that The Hague and other Dutch cities were to be blown up by means of V-2 rockets on the approach of the Allied armies, together with the Zuyder Zee dam. On 14 March Himmler had almost reluctantly signed the order that the cities and the dam were to be spared.
‘Once we had good intentions towards Holland’, said Himmler. ‘For us Germanic peoples are not enemies to be destroyed… The Dutch have learnt nothing from history… They could have helped us and we could have helped them. They have done everything to undermine our victory over Bolshevism.’
Himmler also finally agreed on 17 March, the day before Guderian arrived at Hohenlychen and persuaded him to resign his army command, that he would meet in the strictest secrecy a representative of the World Jewish Congress at Hartzwalde. Kersten suggested that Storch should come to Germany, provided Himmler would guarantee his personal safety.
‘Nothing will happen to Herr Storch’, said Himmler. ‘I pledge my honour and my life on that.’
Kersten, as before, was careful to write Himmler a letter confirming everything that the Reichsführer S.S. had promised to do. Himmler, in his turn, sent an invitation to Storch in which he tried to make out that he had always from the start wanted to draft a helpful and humane approach to the Jewish problem, and had in fact shown his good intentions in recent weeks. He also confirmed his agreements with Kersten in writing, through his secretary Brandt.
On 22 March, the day Kersten flew back to Stockholm to report his various successes to Günther, Himmler received his successor on the battlefront, General Gotthard Heinrici, at Prenzlau, his military headquarters. He had thought fit the previous day to venture seeing Hitler in Berlin, and Guderian saw him walking with the Führer among the rubble in the Chancellery garden. Afterwards Guderian had told him that in his view the war was lost and the wasteful slaughter of men should be stopped at once.
‘Go with me to Hitler and urge him to arrange an armistice’, Guderian demanded.
This was too much for Himmler.
‘My dear Colonel-General’, said Himmler very precisely. ‘It is still too early for that.’ Guderian was disgusted. He could get no further with Himmler, however much he argued. ‘There was nothing to be done with the man’, he says in his memoirs. ‘He was afraid of Hitler.’
On 22 March Himmler’s last act as a soldier was to assemble both his chiefs of staff and his stenographers at Prenzlau and dictate in the presence of Heinrici his summary of what had happened during the period of his command. As he went on talking, this grandiloquent scene of farewell became increasingly absurd. Heinrici’s professional opinion was that ‘in four months Himmler had failed to grasp the basic elements of generalship’. After two hours’ dictation he became so incoherent that the stenographers could no longer make sense of what he had said and, together with the staff officers, they excused themselves from further work. Heinrici, impatient to get to the front, was finally released from this ordeal by the telephone: General Busse, one of the commanders in the field, was in grave difficulties and wanted to report to his Commander-in-Chief. Himmler straightaway handed the receiver to Heinrici.
‘You are in command now’, he said. ‘You give him the necessary orders.’36
Before the meeting broke up, Heinrici, like Guderian, tried to sound Himmler on the possibilities of initiating peace negotiations with the Western Allies. Himmler tried to sound inconclusive, but admitted cautiously that he had caused certain steps to be taken.
In the chaos of the last month of the war, many men were salving their consciences by attempting to conduct negotiations with the Allies which might, once the war was over, present them in a more favourable light. Among these was General Wolff, who had been Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters until 1943, when he was appointed Military Governor in Northern Italy. Early in March he went to Switzerland and attempted through Allen Dulles to negotiate the surrender of German forces in Italy. However, he failed to meet the emissaries sent by General Alexander to Zurich to discuss terms with him because he dared not admit to Himmler the full nature of his self-appointed mission. He pretended that his sole interest in holding these meetings lay in the exchange of prisoners, a matter which Himmler declared was the concern of Kaltenbrunner. For the moment there was stalemate, but Wolff was only waiting his chance to challenge Kaltenbrunner’s growing authority and act again on his own behalf.
It is often difficult to make any sense of the rival negotiations that were taking place behind Hitler’s back from motives which were a mixture of desperation and self-interest. According to the evidence given at the Nuremberg Trial by Baldur von Schirach, who was the Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna during the war, Himmler came to Vienna at the end of March to organize the evacuation of Jews from Vienna to the camps at Linz and Mauthausen.
‘I want the Jews now employed in industry’, Schirach reported him to have said, ‘to be taken by boat or by bus, if possible, under the most favourable conditions and with the best medical care to Linz or Mauthausen. Please take every care of these Jews. They are my soundest capital investment.’ Schirach gained the impression that Himmler wanted to ‘redeem himself with this good treatment of the Jews’.37 It seems, however, that such Jews as survived were in fact marched on foot to Mauthausen.
During the first part of April Himmler was frequently at Hohenlychen, and it was here on 2 April that he met Bernadotte for the second time, along with Schellenberg. Himmler appeared nervous and depressed, but he insisted that the war must still go on. He agreed, however, to the partial release of the Scandinavian prisoners, though he said they were not to be released all at once because, as he put it, ‘it would attract too much attention’. Himmler seemed to be almost completely under the distant control of Hitler, but later he sent messages through Schellenberg that, should Hitler’s position change, he hoped Bernadotte would get in touch with Allied headquarters on his behalf. Bernadotte warned Schellenberg to get rid of any illusions either he or Himmler might have that the Allies would ever enter into negotiations with the head of the S.S., the man whom the world regarded as a mass murderer.
Goebbels realized by the beginning of April that the concentration camps were the worst evidence possible for the Allies to discover. ‘I fear that the concentration camps have grown a bit above Himmler’s head’, he said, and von Oven duly wrote down this observation: ‘Just suppose that these camps should be overrun by the enemy in their present condition. What an outcry will be heard.’ It was in fact during April that the first contingent of Allied soldiers liberated Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Himmler believed he had acted with exemplary humanity in allowing these camps, in which conditions had never been worse, to be entered by the Allies without their inhabitants first being blown up in the blockhouses where they lay. The massed overcrowding left both the guards and their prisoners equally helpless to relieve the barest needs of the dying. An appalling, hopeless state of inertia faced the Allied units entering these camps and seeing for the first time what man in the twentieth century could do to man in the name of racial purity. The first British entered Belsen on 15 April, after arranging a truce with the S.S. guards three days before. According to Schellenberg, Kaltenbrunner had ordered the wholesale evacuation of Buchenwald which began, probably without Himmler’s knowledge, on 3 April; Himmler, says Schellenberg, stopped the evacuation on 10 April as soon as he learned of it from the son of the Swiss President, Jean-Marie Musi, to whom on 7 April he had given his word that Buchenwald should be left intact for the Allied liberation, a promise intended to impress General Eisenhower in Himmler’s favour.