CHAPTER 9: The Obedient Man

This combination of ideas offered a solution of sorts to the difficulty of applying traditional values to existing conditions.... he could sustain his belief in the superiority of the class from which he came simply by equating the values ... of his own group with the characteristics of the dominant and moral man.
-- Bradley F. Smith. Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making

A searching study of Heinrich Himmler's early years helps us to understand the kind of mentality which yearned for the return of the Atlantean age, and which could go on to carry out Lanz von Liebenfels' extermination policies -- all the while considering himself a decent human being.

Born on October 7, 1900, the second son of a Bavarian professor who became tutor to the son of the prince of Wittelsbach, Himmler grew up in the Catholic faith. At nineteen, he was earnest enough about his religion to have noted in his diary an internal conflict over a common fraternity practice: "During the sermon I had to endure an inner struggle more serious than any before. The dueling business constantly keeps cropping up. In the evening I prayed. I had, of course, earlier partly overcome it. God will continue to help me to overcome my doubts."

He must have decided that God was not opposed to dueling, because he regularly practiced it. Two decades later, as Reichsfuhrer SS, he expressed no such qualms over the Jewish massacre.

His diary entries recorded in meticulous detail the exact times of arrival and departure of buses and people, and the number of swims he took, banal impressions of books he read, pointing to a pedantic, assiduous character, prone to pontificating. He was a collector of stamps and secrets. He took it upon himself to spy on his elder brother's fiancee, going so far as to hire a private detective to gather incriminating evidence of her disloyalty and succeeding in ending the betrothal.

Once he left the safe haven of his snug middle-class family, his rigid character structure could not bend to the raw winds blowing through Germany. Never a careful thinker, he anguished over the impossibility of finding a respectable niche in the conventional society which gave him comfort. He had been an officer candidate during the war, but when it was over, there were rumors about attacks on officers in Bavaria by Communist revolutionaries. Himmler wrote to his parents, urging them to send civilian clothes so that he could travel unmolested. He also begged them: "Buy all of the coal you can and also all the food, even if you have to buy it by the pound. In 14 days there will be no more coal and no more electric light.... Father, you must join the Bayerisch Volkspartei, it is the only hope." A postscript, only for his father's eyes, cautioned: "Don't let mother go out alone at night. Not without protection. Be careful in your letters. You can't be sure."

In self-defense, Himmler slowly adopted more and more of the ideology of the radical right, to the distress of his moderate family. Sentimental novels extolling the traditional virtues gave way, in his reading, to vitriolic accounts of the origin of World War I. Like Sebottendorff, they blamed Germany's troubles on a Jewish-Freemasonic world conspiracy. The world-conspiracy theoreticians were themselves beginning to assume the proportions of a world conspiracy.

Some Catholics had long supported the view that Freemasons and Jews were liberal and potentially dangerous to the old order, but Himmler more and more withdrew from identification with the church which, though conservative, was not fanatical enough. He read the "hate" literature with delight, making terse comments in his diary:

A book that explains everything and tells us whom we must fight against next time. It is true and one has the impression that it is objective, not just hate-filled anti-Semitism. Because of this it has more effect. These terrible Jews. Even an initiate is shaken when he reads all this with understanding. If only some of the eternally blind could have it put before their eyes.

Writers like Fritsch, Chamberlain, and Gobineau helped him to justify his own frustrations, while the whole culture's increasing infatuation with spiritualism made it possible for him to bridge the gap between the death of the old religious faith and his personal longing for evidence of the existence of the supernatural.

The books he read signified a deep involvement with and leanings toward spiritualism and the occult. He labeled occult theories "unbelievably deep and significant" and particularly enjoyed Karl du Prel's Der Spiritismus ("Spiritualism") because it "really lets me believe in spiritualism and introduced me to it correctly for the first time."

He was impressed by the arguments for transmigration of souls in a book on life after death, and noted that it gave him "meaningful new grounds" for believing in it. This interest in and sympathy with the occult endured throughout his life. Without it, his role as Reichsfuhrer SS would have been played out quite differently.

As in the case of Lanz and Hitler, his occultism was bound up with eroticism. To all three, sexuality was decadent, and the loose morality of Western Europe after the war seemed to them to travel like a plague, spread by the "decadent" people, namely, the Jews. They believed Jews were bestial in their passions, corrupting pure German womanhood and making all women join the radical cause of feminism. They also saw the Jews as cunning, practical pimps and pornographers, able to profit materially from prostitution and from the growing interest in "filth." These were popular volkisch themes, and Himmler accepted them.

Right after World War I, Himmler was in contact with a number of Bavarian volkisch groups which were working to get rid of the republican government. In 1923 he joined the Free Corps, and he must have enjoyed the sense of participating in a grand design which was to lead Germany back to greatness. He was welcomed into the Nazi party because, as his superior, Gregor Strasser, put it, "the fellow's doubly useful -- he's got a motor-bike and he's full of frustrated ambition to be a soldier." Hinmler soon realized that he had a penchant for secret service.

When, in 1925, the SS (Schutzstaffel) was formed as a special bodyguard for Hitler in each district, Himmler was put in charge of his local unit. It brought him little glory at first. Its petty duties included soliciting for Party newspaper subscriptions. But in 1927, when the SS Order was nationalized, Himmler, because of his demonstrated administrative abilities, was made deputy leader, and in 1929, Reichsfuhrer SS. The nature of the organization changed. It became a central bureaucracy for dispensing terrorism, an elitist political police, giving Himmler powers second only to Hitler. What fitted Himmler for the job were his skill at pigeonholing people and assigning categories to them, and especially, the rigid personality defenses he had developed as a student. As Bradley Smith has pointed out in his biography, "the pose of omniscient hardness" which he developed early made it possible for him to overcome his awkwardness in social encounters and to impose himself on others, despite his lack of charisma. His "social mask" became a weapon habitually used to make others subordinate to his wishes. Thus, despite his colorlessness, he was able to compel his Black Guards to go against their own standards of morality and justify horrifying murder tactics as utopian idealism. He said proudly of his black-uniformed SS: "I know that there are many people in Germany who feel sick when they see this black tunic; we can understand that and do not expect to be beloved by overmany people."

Sometimes he saw his Black Guards as an elite cadre of Teutonic warriors, and sometimes as medieval knights protecting their lord, Adolf Hitler. Himmler's interest in the Germanic past and in the Middle Ages went back to his youth, when he used to spend summer vacations looking for ancient stones and artifacts, a hobby he learned from his father.

His belief in the transmigration of souls led him to think he was the reincarnation of the tenth-century German king Heinrich I the Fowler, with whom he communicated in his sleep. In 1937, he had the monarch's bones dug up and placed in the crypt of Quedlinburg Cathedral, after a holy procession. He chose the town of Quedlinburg, in the Harz Mountains, because it had been founded by the king. Himmler invited Germans to make a pilgrimage to the tomb to honor Heinrich the Fowler. Yearly, on July 2, the date of the king's death, Himmler held a midnight ritual in the clammy crypt. One of the great charms which the medieval monarch had for Himmler was his anti-Slav crusade. On the thousandth anniversary of Heinrich's death, Himmler stood before Wehrmacht officers and braided and medaled SS dignitaries and pledged to continue the crusade for German expansion in the east. It was not clear whether he was really talking about himself or about his namesake when he praised him.

Like List and Lanz, Himmler was obsessed with the secret medieval society called the Order of the Teutonic Knights. There, a candidate had to prove pure noble German ancestry for eight generations on both sides of the family tree. Himmler, in creating a secret order suitable for a mass society, naturally dispensed with the idea of social or economic aristocracy and made the whole Aryan race aristocratic, an idea which List and Lanz had popularized before him. He admired the rigid organization of the Teutonic Knights, and the strictness of their rules. But he must have admired their secrecy above everything else, given his personal propensity for secrets. Even in his brief stint as orderly-room clerk in the army's officer candidates' school, he had collected odd bits of personal information about his fellow cadets, as if in apprenticeship for the job of secret police chief which lay in his future. A few years later, Gregor Strasser laughed him to scorn when he heard about this, asking: "Whatever use do you suppose will derive from knowing who did fatigue duties for insubordination in the 119th Bavarian Infantry Regiment in 1919?" To which Himmler replied: "One never knows."

Himmler was so fanatical a spy that he noted about Party members: "Schwarz was playing Mendelssohn on his gramophone when I arrived. It is as well to know of Semitic sympathies." And: "I noticed in [Mucke's] bookcase a copy of Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century. He is well chosen for the Fuhrer's personal troop." And about citizens in general: "In the fishmonger's there was a man who mentioned in a low voice to his wife that he suspected treachery in the ranks of the Party. I made it my business to find out his name from the shopkeeper. Such information might be useful in the future."

Himmler knew what a powerful motivation a secret order, with difficult rules and a hierarchical structure, could be; its mere existence held members together in a common bond, subject to the same vows of silence on certain questions.

In trying to create a new Order of Teutonic Knights out of his SS, Himmler was also mindful of the power of the Jesuits. According to his assistant, Walter Schellenberg, he deliberately built the SS organization on the principles of the Society of Jesus, using their statutes and spiritual exercises. In fact, Himmler was called' "the Black Jesuit" by his enemies and compared with the order's founder, Ignatius Loyola, by Hitler, who was pleased to have his fanatical devotion.

Schellenberg testified at the Nuremberg Trials that Himmler had

the best and richest library on the Jesuit Order, whose literature he perused at night for years. Thus he built up his SS organization according to Jesuit principles. Its basis was the constitution and the exercises of Ignatius de Loyola: Its supreme law was absolute, blind obedience.... Himmler himself, as SS General, was the Order's General Commander. In Westphalia, near Paderborn, he kept a medieval castle, the Wevelsburg, which served, so to say, as the SS monastery.... The roots of this attitude ... go back to his father's education and his severe Catholic conduct of life.

The essential principle which Himmler borrowed from the Jesuits was the oath of absolute blind obedience. In this, he outdid the Jesuits. Though he sought to eliminate all competition to his own esoteric order and officially abominated the Jesuits, they and the SS had a common enemy.

This enemy was the Freemason, who, in his resistance to the dogmas of Original Sin and Grace, in his tolerance and humanism, became the symbol of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the possibility of human perfectibility on earth. His was a rival universal superstate which threatened to replace the less flexible Catholic Church. It was rumored that the Jesuits had destroyed the eighteenth-century Order of the Illuminati by infiltrating the group, a mystical association started by Adam Weishaupt, a former Jesuit student, and diverting it from its original aims. The same suspicions were circulated about Jesuit intrigue in Masonic lodges. The introduction of hierarchical "higher degrees" into Freemasonry was scorned by some Masons as evidence of a Catholic spirit. There were papal bulls of condemnation against the Freemasons, but their power and political influence continued to increase throughout the Enlightenment. The new spirit, which was actually one of reason and an interest in material well-being, was viewed by the Church as a threat to the Faith.

The Jesuits used science in the service of faith, for their aim was never the dispassionate study of astronomy or biology, but the combating of "Satan," from the nineteenth century on, in the guise of materialism.

Germany was the home of the first Jesuit settlement. In Bavaria, particularly, the order stood firm against Lutheranism and held that section of the country, so much so that Munich was called "a German Rome."

The Counter Reformation in Germany was greatly helped by the erection of numerous schools. The zeal of the Jesuits filled the Lutherans with fear and trembling, and a vicious battle ensued; as Rene Fulop-Miller points out in The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, "it became more and more customary in Germany for men to express the strength of their religious convictions by filthy insults directed against their opponents."

It was in Bavaria, too, that the Jesuits introduced their unique system of "spiritual exercises," reporting to the Pope: "No small benefit has accrued from the Exercises. Some who were falling away are now strengthened, and some who had fallen away are now restored." The exercises spread widely among the Bavarians, adapted to the working classes, under the directive never to "lay too heavy a burden on a too little enlightened spirit or a too weak heart." An "exercise house" was created in Munich, where an efficient lay apostolate was produced.

The spiritual exercises of the Jesuits are designed to awaken the natural powers of the will and connect them with the divine will; the penitent is enjoined to undergo a rigorous series of pictorial imaginings lasting four weeks, during which time he comes to see, hear, smell, and feel scenes of Heaven and Hell. He strives to converse with Jesus and pictures the Incarnation. In an exercise called "composition: seeing the place," the imagination is used to clothe ideas with a visible form. There are prayers for a definite desire and an exercise called "fixing of the objects," and in the end, the penitent's life is changed. These exercises are considered the foundation of the order.

That Himmler practiced visualization is clear from Walter Schellenberg's account in his memoirs. When General Werner von Fritsch was brought to trial on the false accusation of homosexuality, Schellenberg reports:

I witnessed for the first time some of the rather strange practices resorted to by Himmler through his inclination toward mysticism. He assembled twelve of the most trusted SS leaders in a room next to the one in which von Fritsch was being questioned and ordered them all to concentrate their minds on exerting a suggestive influence over the General that would induce him to tell the truth. I happened to come into the room by accident, and to see these twelve SS leaders sitting in a circle, all sunk in deep and silent contemplation, was indeed a remarkable sight.

Himmler had derived his Round Table idea from the court of the twelfth-century Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Under the influence of knightly thought compulsion, the object of the Round Table's concentration had to submit his will to theirs.

The student of occultism will recognize in the projection of Himmler's picture the magical view that, through visualization, we can change reality. It is an important trick of the trade. This is how the occultist believes he exercises his power, by holding in his mind a mental picture of what he wishes to achieve.

Despite the fact that Himmler's odd ideas made him a ridiculous figure to his underlings, he ruled over them with an iron hand. In a quieter time, he would have been a harmless crank, cultivating his herb garden, studying astrology, graphology, antiquity, mesmerism. His pursuit of these interests in the midst of and even in the service of the most awful atrocities in history has made some historians suspect that he was mad. He had herb gardens planted right in the concentration camps. His order that prisoners be frozen and then, when near death, placed in bed with prostitutes (non-Aryan) to see if body heat and sexual passion could restore them to warmth was inspired by his belief in animal magnetism, the reciprocal action between all living bodies. Through his decrees to SS men on marriage and procreation, he hoped to create a mutant race of supermen. Under his direction, Jewish and Russian heads were severed and sent, in hermetically sealed containers, to a research center to be analyzed for subhuman traits. Just before the end of the war, with the Reich crumbling, Schellenberg arranged a meeting between Himmler and the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, to negotiate a surrender. Schellenberg urged his superior not "to expound his astrological and philosophical theories," but even at that tense moment Himmler could not resist putting aside the urgent talk of peace to lecture for an hour on runes. To the discerning eye, he insisted, the uninterrupted script of the Northmen of the Dark Ages resembled Japanese ideograms. This was evidence that the Japanese, too, were Aryans.

The image that Himmler apparently had of himself was that of an idealistic man of science. Yet it was a piece of role-playing, and one is never sure whether he really deceived himself as well as others with it. As fanatical and earnest as he was in the pursuit of his crazy researches, they were convenient rationales for his ideology, as they were for Hitler. The image of the dispassionate scientific researcher was often distorted. So, for instance, Hermann Rauschning reports a conversation with Himmler, incensed at the audacity of a professor who dared to criticize the Nazi dogma about the origins of the Teutons:

What ideas, he said, these gentlemen got into their heads! ... if the State or the party had declared that a certain view was regarded as the desired starting-point for scientific research, that view must be accepted simply as a scientific axiom....

"We don't care a hoot whether this or something else was the real truth about the prehistory of the German tribes [said Himmler]. Science proceeds from hypotheses that change every year or two. So there's no earthly reason why the party should not lay down a particular hypothesis as the starting-point, even if it runs counter to current scientific opinion. The one and only thing that matters to us, and the thing these people are paid for by the State, is to have ideas of history that strengthen our people in their necessary national pride.

"In all this troublesome business we are only interested in one thing -- to project into the dim and distant past the picture of our nation as we envisage it for the future. Every bit of Tacitus, in his Germania, is tendentious stuff. Our teaching of German origins has depended for centuries on falsification. We are entitled to impose one of our own.... Prehistory is the doctrine of the eminence of the Germans at the dawn of civilization."

Himmler's views and deeds were not the excesses of madness, though they were not always rational. They owe more to the dissociations of the fanatical occultist than they do to the divided personality. If he spent much of his own time and that of his men in investigating crankish researches, this did not diminish his talents for efficient organization.

If his reality was non-ordinary, it was not because he was crazy, but rather, as his masseur, Dr. Felix Kersten, tells us, because he was "extremely superstitious." He believed in "good and evil spirits" and was "always afraid of an invisible power" to which he would "one day have to give an account of himself." When Dr. Kersten asked him how, with this view, he could do the things he had to do, believing as he did that according to the doctrine of karma his deeds would determine his destiny in his next incarnation, Himmler answered:

You oughtn't to look at things from such a limited and egotistical point of view; you have to consider the Germanic world as a whole -- which also has its Karma. A man has to sacrifice himself, even though it is often very hard for him; he oughtn't to think of himself. 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. I try to reach a compromise in my own life; I try to help people and do good, relieve the oppressed and remove injustices wherever I can. Do you think my heart's in all the things which have to be done simply from reasons of state? What wouldn't I give to be Minister for Religious Matters like [Bernhard] Rust and be able to dedicate myself to positive achievements only! ...

Over and over again, Himmler referred to the work of the SS men in concentration camps as sacrifice. It was as though they had to suffer a greater ordeal than their victims. One of his most interesting speeches to his officers sympathizes with this ordeal: "To have stuck it out, and at the same time ... to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written...."

Every cause has its idea of sacrifice, calling on the individual to give up his well-being for the sake of something greater. Himmler's idea of sacrifice was influenced by Eastern philosophy. He had read the Bhagavad-Gita, the Vedas, the Rig-Vedas, the sayings of Buddha, the Visudi-Magga, and the Book of Purity, and had learned to practice that detachment from his acts which, while it might seem silly or monstrous to the foolish, was purifying to the wise.

Karma required only that the individual carry on his unavoidable duties, disregarding the consequences. As it is written in the Bhagavad-gita: "One should not give up the activity to which one is born (sahajam karma: the duty incumbent on one through birth, caste, profession), even though this should be attended by evil; for all undertakings are enveloped by evil, as fire by smoke."

The disengagement from the effects of fulfilling one's duties was self-sacrifice.

Himmler was particularly fond of the Bhagavad-Gita, and told Dr. Kersten that he "never moved without it." He prized it for its "great Aryan qualities." He was also an avid student of the Arthasastra), Hinduism's anticipation of Machiavelli. This handbook of statecraft reached the West shortly before World War I. It seemed to Christian scholars to embody pagan wickedness, and though it was no more cynical than Machiavelli, it was not redeemed by his Western spirit. The Kautilya Arthasastra was especially cherished by Himmler. Here was laid out a crafty system for international espionage in the service of the tyrant state, from which a fanatical Nazi flunky could learn a good deal. Its Oriental despots and warriors were Himmler's people -- Aryans. Their amorality accorded well with his own, and could even be linked to the divine essence. The artifices and cunning advocated by the Kautilya were nowhere practiced more heartily than in the Third Reich, where hypocrisy and deception were raised to a fine art.

Himmler began more and more to propagate occult ideas among the SS. When several astronomers were courageous enough to call Hoerbiger's theory an outmoded concept, Himmler answered:

I advocate unrestricted research of whatever kind and that includes unrestricted research into glacial cosmogony. I intend to encourage that research and in so doing I find myself in the best of company ... as the Fuhrer, too, is a convinced supporter of this theory so much abominated by scientific hacks.... the Ministry ... must put these opinionated schoolmasters in their place. There are a great many things we should like to see researched, even by non-scientists.

Under his supervision in the SS, a great many things were researched. The crank succeeded eventually in having millions of men explore his fanatical notions, sending to their ruin millions more.

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