They married early in July 1928. One of Marga’s coy and excited letters, written eight days before their marriage, survives in Himmler’s carefully preserved files, and relates to the house and smallholding they bought with her money in Waltrudering, some ten miles outside Munich. In her joy at the thought of marriage, she hastily calculates what they are spending and whether or not they can avoid taking out a mortgage. In the margin Himmler coldly notes that her totalling is out by 60 marks. Nevertheless, Himmler, her ‘naughty darling’, will soon be hers, as she goes on to remind him.13
The smallholding at Waltrudering became a modest enterprise and was left largely in the hands of Marga Himmler. They kept about fifty hens, and they marketed produce and agricultural implements; it made a little money over and above Himmler’s salary, which stood now at around 200 marks a month. The following year Marga gave birth to her only child, their daughter Gudrun.
This year, 1929, became the turning-point in Himmler’s life. On 6 January Hitler issued an order appointing him Reichsführer S.S. in place of the commander Erhard Heiden, whose deputy he had been. It was a far-seeing appointment. Something in this clerk-like man with his military ambitions and scrupulous self-discipline must have revealed to Hitler that he had in him the kind of perfectionism necessary to create a reliable counter-force to the undisciplined mob of storm-troopers who roamed the streets in the name of the Nazis.14
II. Reichsführer S.S.
Though the appointment of Himmler to the command of the S.S. was for Hitler a matter of expediency, for the man himself it was a moment of fulfilment. He was now Reichsführer S.S. This new, high-sounding title was in itself a challenge to his tenacity and an inspiration to the particular vision germinating in his brain, his own interpretation of what Hitler, with his aid, might make of the German people in the distant future.
Himmler was now twenty-eight, a young man with a pregnant wife older than himself, and a modest smallholding. To be Reichsführer S.S. based on Munich was to be in command of less than 300 men, and there were limits even to this very minor place of power. In Berlin, the centre of radical action stirred up by Goebbels’s violent propaganda, Kurt Daluege was also appointed by Hitler to be head of the local S.S. and empowered to operate independently of Himmler, who was in any case regarded, along with his force, as subordinate not only to Hitler but to the general organization of the S.A., the brownshirt Party battalions on the streets. The S.S. was in fact a force within a force, its special task nominally the protection of Hitler and other Nazi leaders at meetings, rallies and parades. But, according to Gunther d’Alquen, who was later to become editor of Das Schwarze Korps, the special journal of the S.S., Hitler had instructed his Reichsführer S.S. to make the corps into an utterly dependable body of carefully selected men.
Himmler was therefore able to indulge his vision. In spite of his sloping shoulders, his close-cropped hair, his neatly trimmed moustache and rimless pince-nez with its ear-chains suitable for a respectable clerk, he saw his unit of Black Guards as an elite band of warriors whose unique character would elevate them far above the street-ruffians of the S.A. They were to be made into Hitler’s knights-at-arms.
This elevation of his men became Himmler’s great obsession. The fact that he played comparatively little part in the day-by-day strategy and intrigue with which Hitler, Goring and Goebbels worked their way to power between 1929 and 1933 did not at this stage trouble him. He had his own bright, particular star to follow. His immediate ambitions in the Party were fulfilled for a while by his command of the S.S. and by the seat in the Reichstag that was allocated to him after the 1930 elections. His domestic ambitions, such as they might be, were fulfilled when his wife had given birth to their child, Gudrun, in 1929. Marga Himmler was attended by a Dr Brack, whose son, Dr Viktor Brack, was some twelve years later to take charge of Himmler’s euthanasia programme, after first serving him in the capacity of a chauffeur.
The S.S. did not expand suddenly under Himmler’s leadership. The years 1929 and 1930 represent primarily a period of preparation; the final stage of expansion came later, as we shall see, during 1931, when many thousands of men were added to the force. Their initial duties, when the S.S. had been summoned to roll-calls and allocated in groups to accompany various Party speakers to their meetings, were by then superseded; by 1931 the S.S. had other work, at once more secret and more spectacular.
The first substantial stage in the establishment of a permanent, élite corps came when Himmler issued, in January 1932, the notorious marriage code for the members of the S.S. The code was based on the principles outlined by Walter Darré in his book Um Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), which was published under the auspices of the Party in Munich in 1929.
Darré was Hitler’s agricultural expert, and he had come to believe in selective breeding as a result of his studies. He was born in the Argentine in 1895, and had been educated in England at King’s College School, Wimbledon. He had for a while been a civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, but had been dismissed in 1929 after a disagreement with his colleagues. In the same year he published a book on the peasantry as the life source of the Nordic race. His ambition was to become Reich Minister of Agriculture, and this indeed is what he became in 1933.
Darré is of importance only because of the hardening influence he had on certain of Himmler’s prejudices, which were later to develop into dire obsessions. Darré was some five years older than Himmler, and in a movement that found it expedient to encourage unscientific theories if the results arrived at were useful as propaganda, Darré became an accepted ‘thinker’ on behalf of the Nazis, closely linked with Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal propounders of the myth which convinced the Party that the true Germans possessed a unique racial superiority.
Rosenberg was of German stock, but he had been born in the Baltic town of Reval and had studied architecture in Moscow before escaping to Germany at the time of the Russian Revolution. He had become editor of Hitler’s journal Völkischer Beobachter in 1923. In his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, he declared the humane ideals of Christian Europe to be a useless creed. What Europe needed, he said, was to be freed from the soft, abstract Christian principles derived from Asia Minor and the East, and to discover a new philosophy, which would be rooted once more in the entrails of the earth and recognize the racial superiority and cleanliness of Nordic man. ‘A culture always decays’, wrote Rosenberg, ‘when humanitarian ideals… obstruct the right of the dominant race to rule those it has subjugated.’ He saw in the German people the race endowed by nature with a true, mystic understanding, a ‘religion of the blood’. Christianity, on the other hand, taught the decadent doctrine that all races shared an equality of soul, which the German race would soon show to be nothing but a vicious and insidious illusion.
In place of the meek and all-forgiving, Rosenberg created the ideal of the ‘powerful, earth-bound figure’, the ‘strong peasant’, and it was at this point that Darré, Rosenberg’s disciple and Himmler’s teacher, took over the spiritual education of his leader.
In Blood and Soil, Darré gave his reasons why the German race was so especially privileged. His assumptions were based on the essential nobility of the Nordic peasantry, whose blood was as rich and fruitful as the soil they tilled. So great was their virtue that the future strength of Europe depended on the survival of their stock; it was essential they should breed and multiply until their blond and shining youth outnumbered and outfaced the lurking, decadent Slavs and Jews, whose blood was poison to the human race and whose haunts were the healthless streets of towns and cities.1