Himmler decided to act as a kind of elder statesman in Doenitz’s cabinet at Ploen for as long as he could. He was plainly unable to accept the fact that he no longer held the offices to which he had been formerly attached. His immediate retinue still amounted to some 150 staff officers and assistants. But neither Doenitz nor Himmler knew the full terms of Himmler’s rejection by Hitler. The messenger from the Bunker had failed in his mission of bringing the Führer’s testament to his successor, and Bormann, as everyone then believed, had been killed while trying to escape from the Bunker on the night of 30 April. Had they been able to read the carefully typed terms of Hitler’s denunciation they would at least have known what the Führer had felt about his former Minister: ‘Goering and Himmler, by their secret negotiations with the enemy, without my knowledge or approval, and by their illegal attempts to seize power in the State, quite apart from their treachery to my person, have brought irreparable shame on the country and the whole people.’ All they knew in fact was what Greim, the wounded leader of the Luftwaffe, and his devoted pilot, Hanna Reitsch, may have told them of Hitler’s paroxysms of anger, and what Goebbels’s signal indicated about the distribution of the principal offices of state, which neither Bormann nor Goebbels had arrived to take up. Doenitz, concerned only to rid himself of the past and surrender in a manner becoming an Admiral of the Fleet, was most unwilling to have a man of Himmler’s reputation serving in any cabinet of his own making. Yet he dared not in the circumstances entirely disregard him, so he put up with his presence at the council table without confirming him in any office.
When on 4 May Montgomery’s terms for unconditional surrender were discussed, Himmler’s views were aired along with those of Doenitz’s other advisers. He felt that the troops in Norway should be surrendered to Sweden to save them from captivity in Russia, and that some concessions might be gained if an offer were made to surrender peaceably the many places outside Germany still held by German troops. Schellenberg, resolutely travelling between Sweden, Denmark and Germany in his efforts to obtain agreement to a peaceful resolution of the German occupation of the Scandinavian countries, turned not to Himmler but to Doenitz and Schwerin-Krosigk when he at length arrived at five o’clock that afternoon after a fearful journey from Copenhagen. The following day, 5 May, he left again for Denmark, saying goodbye to Himmler, in whom he was by now no longer interested.
On 5 May Himmler gathered his own leaders and advisers around him, including S.S. Obergruppenführer Ohlendorff of the Security Office, S.S. Obergruppenführer von Weyrsch of the Secret Police and S.S. Obergruppenführer von Herff, a general of the Waffen S.S.; Brandt was also there, as was Gebhardt, who had left his patients at Hohenlychen in the care of the Russians. To them and their colleagues he solemnly recited policies so utterly out of keeping with the situation they can scarcely be credited; only a prolonged blindness to reality through shock can account for them. He, for one, was not going to give up and commit suicide. He would, he said, establish his own S.S. government in Schleswig-Holstein in order to conduct independent peace negotiations with the Western Powers. He then began to distribute new titles to his followers as his partners in founding an entirely new Nazi regime.
Himmler’s rejection by Hitler, however, was followed on 6 May by his rejection at the hands of Doenitz, who personally gave Himmler his formal dismissal in writing:
‘Dear Herr Reich Minister,
In view of the present situation, I have decided to dispense with your further assistance as Reich Minister of the Interior and member of the Reich Government, as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, and as chief of the Police. I now regard all your offices as abolished. I thank you for the service which you have given to the Reich.’
Along with Himmler, Doenitz dismissed Goebbels, who was dead, and other Nazi ministers who still remained like ghosts from an horrific and evil past.16 He also forbade the continuation of resistance by diehard Nazis of the S.S.
But Himmler would not leave. After 6 May he haunted Flensburg along with his staff, his guards and his equipment, a monstrous survivor without a domain. He told Schwerin-Krosigk he would carefully consider his advice, but he still had obstinate dreams of maintaining his individual power. He went to the Nazi Commander of the German forces in Schleswig and Denmark, Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, in the vain hope of finding in him an ally. But Busch only wanted to get the arrangements for his own surrender concluded. So Himmler returned to the headquarters he had set up in Flensburg from which, one by one, his retinue were melting away.
On 8 May he reduced his fleet of cars to four and made a first gesture of self-abrogation by shaving off his moustache. He wondered where he could go in order to escape unwelcome attention. While Ohlendorff advised him to surrender and answer the world’s outcry against himself and the S.S., he considered, naturally without reaching any firm decision, whether he should take refuge with his friend the Prince of Waldeck, an autocratic general who had charge of the S.S. establishment on his estate at Arolsen.17
At length, on 10 May, Himmler and his remaining entourage left Flensburg and set out for Marne at the Dicksander Koog on the east coast of Schleswig-Holstein.18 It took them two days to get there, and they slept either out in the open or inside railway stations during the remaining days of their flight to the south. Himmler could think of only two things, how he could have saved his position and bargained with the Western Allies, and what was happening now to his two families in the south.
Eventually four cars reached the mouth of the Elbe, and it proved impossible to take them further; the distance across the water was about five miles. Reluctantly the little group of S.S. refugees, no better off now than hundreds of thousands of Germans wandering homeless on the roads, abandoned their vehicles and crossed the Elbe; they were ferried over the estuary unrecognized in a fishing boat with other refugees for the price of 500 Marks. There was nothing for them to do now but walk, passing the nights in peasant farmsteads and covering a few miles each day on foot. During the next five days they tramped slowly south through Neuhaus to Bremervorde, which they reached on the morning of 21 May. They had travelled in all little more than a hundred miles from Flensburg.
They were a strange contingent. In addition to Kiermaier, the group still included Brandt, Ohlendorf, Karl Gebhardt, Waffen S.S. Colonel Werner Grothmann and Major Macher. They had removed the insignia from their uniforms and pretended to be members of the Secret Field Police, a branch of the Gestapo, making their way to Bavaria. Himmler wore a patch over his eye like a pirate and carried a pass that had once belonged to Heinrich Hitzinger, a man whose identity papers Himmler had kept by him after he had been condemned to death by the Peoples’ Court in case they might prove useful.
At Bremervörde they realized they needed travel documents to pass through the check-point set up by the British Military Authority. Kiermaier confirmed this with the local District Councillor. They then decided that Kiermaier should apply to the British for these travel permits while another member of their party stood outside to watch the result and warn Himmler if Kiermaier were arrested. Since the Secret Field Police were in any case on the British Army’s black list, Kiermaier was kept in custody. When he did not reappear, Himmler and his companions slipped away.