TRAVELERS BOARDING THE TRAIN to Passau in the old Bavarian city of Landshut on September 24, 1924, may scarcely have noticed a pale, anemic-looking man with a slender book tucked beneath his arm. As a newly minted organizer for the National Socialist Freedom Movement, an offshoot of the recently banned Nazi party, Heinrich Himmler settled into his seat and waited impatiently for the train to depart, taking note of the exact time so he could record this event in his diary later. He was a precise, meticulous man, with a thin, spindly frame that had never known much exercise and a head that was one or two sizes too small for his body. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and a neatly trimmed mustache, and his straight brown hair was cut extremely short. His hands were small and doll-like. He was, all in all, a rather far cry from the men he sought to attract to the Nazi cause—brawny farmers and burly street fighters with a knack for breaking heads. Himmler, as one associate later joked, resembled “a half-starved shrew.”1
If the studious party official felt cowed in any way by the new company he was keeping, he did not let on. At twenty-three, he possessed a haughty, condescending manner with a thin smattering of charm. He was bright, well educated, connected to the best social circles, and he possessed a romantic sense of his destiny. He believed that fate held something in store for him, a moment of greatness when he would someday be called upon to perform a momentous duty for his country.2 He intended to be ready. To prepare for that day, he read extensively. For the train trip from Landshut, where he was living, he had selected a book of classical history borrowed from friends.3
Germania was the work of Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman historian who had lived as a boy through the scandalous excesses of Emperor Nero. Fearing that Rome was rushing headlong down a road to ruin in the first century A.D., Tacitus decided to pen a kind of wake-up call to his fellow Romans. He searched about for a more moral society to hold up as an example, finally settling on those of the diverse barbarian tribes living east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, a region known to Romans as Germania. Germania read a little like modern anthropology, but Tacitus was clearly lacking in intimate knowledge of his subjects. According to modern scholars, he gathered his information from older texts and from stories he heard from tribesmen living in the Roman capital.4 The resulting description of the Germanic tribes—their valor in war, their abhorrence of adultery, their boisterous hospitality—was terribly flawed. But Himmler was captivated. He raced through Germania in its German translation, finishing it that very day on the train. He then added it to his booklist, summing up, as he always did, his impressions in few sentences. Germania, he observed, was a “wonderful portrait of how high, pure and capable our ancestors were. This is how we will become again, or at least part of us.”5
It was an immensely revealing remark. Already, at the age of twenty-three, Himmler had begun to reach toward and formulate a deceptively simple idea that would guide both the SS and the Ahnenerbe in later years and influence the course of European history. Already, he had begun to think of Germany’s ancestors and their primeval traditions as a kind of template for the future, a blueprint for a better Reich.
By 1924, the die had clearly been cast. But how, one wonders, did Himmler’s deep, abiding interest in the past come about?
THE SINGLE MOST important influence on Himmler as a child was his father, a prominent Bavarian educator. Gebhard Himmler was the son of a police sergeant turned district official, but as a young man Gebhard had aspired to greater things. In 1884, he passed the entrance examinations for the University of Munich, joining the privileged ranks of its students. Over the next ten years, he studied philosophy, polished his Latin and Greek grammar, and majored in the arcane field of philology. The latter, according to the Athenaeum in 1892, was “a master science, whose duty is to present to us the whole of ancient life, and to give archaeology its just place by the side of literature.”6
On graduation, the elder Himmler found work as an assistant teacher at a Munich school and, through his uncle’s connections as a court chaplain, landed a post as tutor to Prince Heinrich, a member of the famous Wittelsbach family.7 The Wittelsbachs had supplied Bavaria with a succession of kings, scholars, art connoisseurs, generals, eccentrics, and madmen for nearly seven hundred years. Their medieval-looking palace in the center of Munich bustled with interesting people. Prince Heinrich’s aunt Therese, for example, was a distinguished ethnographer, zoologist, botanist, and anthropologist who had mounted expeditions to such faraway parts of the world as the Brazilian rain forest; her apartment in the palace brimmed with strange and wonderful collections.8
In 1897, Gebhard Himmler married Anna Maria Heyder, the daughter of a prosperous merchant, and the young couple took up residence in the old medieval heart of Munich. By then, the young Wittelsbach prince had outgrown his need for a tutor, so Gebhard took a teaching position at a prominent Munich high school offering a classical education in Latin and Greek. There he grew a “Velásquesian beard,” dressed stylishly in fashionable suits, wore an air of “pampered elegance,” and frequently alluded to his royal and aristocratic connections.9 He was, as one former student recalled, an insufferable social climber who was “laughably pushing and fawning towards the upper classes.”10
His young charges were too frightened, however, to poke fun at him in his presence. Gebhard Himmler possessed a talent for ferreting out the weaknesses of others, and he combined this with a broad streak of cruelty: young pupils who failed to live up to his exacting standards were verbally assaulted and eviscerated in front of their peers in the classroom. His victims apparently never forgot these sessions. So traumatized was one famous student, Alfred Andersch, that he later published a ninety-five-page-long account describing the schoolmaster’s pitiless verbal attack during a visit to Andersch’s class.11
Munich society saw little of this side of Gebhard’s character, however. He enjoyed a solid reputation in the Bavarian capital, and in the summer of 1900 the young Prince Heinrich willingly agreed to stand as godfather for Gebhard’s second son. The baby, born on October 7, 1900, was named Heinrich in the prince’s honor, and in a spacious flat on Hildegardstrasse—a short walk away from the Wittelsbach palace—the Himmlers set about raising their young family in the cultured comfort of the upper middle class.
Gebhard Himmler naturally took a strong hand in the education of his sons. As a teacher, he closely supervised their schoolwork, even reading and correcting Heinrich’s personal diary for spelling and grammatical errors. As a devout Catholic, he took his children every Sunday to the splendor of St. Michael’s Church, where many of the royal Wittelsbachs were buried, to attend Mass among the wealthy and powerful of Munich society. And as a strong German nationalist, he made certain that his sons received a thorough grounding in the German classics.12
Often in the evenings, he and his wife read aloud to the boys from books on German history or from the sagas of the old European bards.13 In this way, they introduced Heinrich to the Nibelungenlied, a famous medieval tale of Siegfried and the fall of the Nibelung dynasty, and an important source of inspiration for Richard Wagner’s grand operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen.14 The old saga riveted the young Himmler.15 And he was equally enthralled by the Edda, a collection of Old Norse sagas and poems that invoked, among other things, the magical world of Thor, Freya, Loki, and other Norse divinities. Himmler never forgot them.16
Gebhard also saw to it that his children developed a suitable appreciation for the antiquity of their family. The schoolteacher had somehow learned of a Himmler house in Basel that dated back to the thirteenth century. It was older, he sometimes boasted, than the castles of some Bavarian nobles.17 To better display the family lineage, he set aside one room in the family apartment as an Ahnenzimmer or “ancestor room.”18 German kings and princes and nobles often built Ahnensäle in their castles—large gilded halls crowded with portraits of their ancestors, all the better to show off their illustrious bloodlines.19 But the German middle class could ill afford such luxury. Ancestor rooms were unknown in their more modest apartments. Gebhard, however, did not let this stop him. His ancestor room seems to have displayed an assortment of family heirlooms, pictures, and records, as well as a collection of Roman coins and other antiquities that he collected as a hobby.20
At the time, archaeology was all the rage among the upper crust in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm himself had enthused over excavations of an old Roman site at Saalburg and had even gotten his hands dirty while taking part in a dig in Corfu in 1911.21 Gebhard followed suit enthusiastically. In his spare hours, he visited local archaeological sites and hunted for antiquities.22 When his sons were old enough to accompany him, they took excursions into the countryside, visiting places mentioned in histories and old Bavarian tales and searching ruins for rune stones to read and coins, weapons, and potsherds to collect.
Heinrich thoroughly absorbed his father’s enthusiasms. He passed many evenings watching his father classify the finds and catalog them in a filing system he had set up in the ancestor room.23 Archaeology during that era was largely a science of classification. Its disciples sought to identify and sort artifacts into precisely defined categories as a first step in making sense of the chaos of objects recovered from the ground. The pleasure the boy derived from watching his father classify dusty treasures took a more ominous form later in life. Under his direction, concentration-camp officials issued prisoners color-coded badges so that individuals could be classified at a glance into one of eighteen categories—from political prisoners to Gypsies.24
BY THE TIME Heinrich Himmler was ten, he had memorized details of Germany’s most famous historic battles.25 A few years later, when he reached high school, his knowledge of ancient German weaponry and warfare equaled that of some of his teachers. He had begun to consider himself something of an authority on the ancient German past, but his father saw to it that he did not neglect his other studies. “He appears to be a very keen pupil,” wrote one of his classroom teachers in a 1914 report, “whose tireless application, burning ambition and active participation in class have produced excellent results.”26 Consistently, young Himmler finished near the top of his class.
For all his academic aptitude, however, he demonstrated little leadership ability. He was sallow, physically weak, and clumsy, plagued by lung infections and a stomach ailment that produced severe cramps which could incapacitate him. His shrill voice squeaked on the high notes and his laughter sounded like a “perfunctory cackle,” unpleasant to the ear.27 He was unable to take part in most sports, and he was so physically ungainly as a teen that he struggled to master a bicycle, repeatedly falling and skinning his knees and hands.
In 1913, the family moved to Landshut so that Gebhard Himmler could take a position as a deputy headmaster. There the local students discovered that Heinrich regularly reported their pranks to his father, and they began to shun him.28 They turned down his friendly overtures, going silent at his approach and only resuming their conversations when he was safely out of earshot. To avenge this silent treatment, Heinrich began supervising the after-class punishments that his father liberally doled out. This further incensed his classmates. On one occasion, they stuffed him headfirst and flailing into a garbage can in a locked room.29
Away from his hostile classmates, he dreamed of a military career. When World War I broke out in 1914, he followed news of the German campaigns avidly, sopping up details of the latest carnage from newspapers and dispatches at the local telegraph office. When his older brother Gebhard departed for officer-training school in 1916, he was desperate to follow. Isolated from all the terrible bloodshed at the front, he dreamed of glory. And neither the mortal wound that his own royal patron, Prince Heinrich, sustained at the front in 1916, nor the mounting toll of German casualties could dampen Heinrich’s schoolboy ardor.
He hounded his father to let him join up, and in the end the elder Himmler, fearing perhaps that his son might be conscripted into the rank and file, wrote to several influential friends to see if a spot might be found in officer training for the boy. One of his letters hit the mark, and in December 1917, Heinrich joined the Eleventh Bavarian Infantry Regiment as an officer trainee. To the boy’s intense disappointment, however, he spent the rest of the war in training, never setting so much as a foot in the trenches.
LIKE MOST OF his friends and acquaintances, the young Himmler was stunned by the surrender of the Imperial German Army in late 1918 and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm. The bedrock foundation of German society seemed to be crumbling, and when the Allies announced the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, Himmler felt a sense of outrage. Not only did the newly inked treaty call for Germany to relinquish all of its colonies and part of its homeland, it also forced the country’s military commanders to strip down its once mighty army, leaving just one hundred thousand officers and men, all volunteers.
The news shattered Himmler’s dream of a career in the German army, leaving him at loose ends in Landshut. Throughout Germany, a groundswell of discontent washed over the ranks of the newly demobilized, and in nearby Munich, a bloody state of anarchy broke out. Taking advantage of the growing power vacuum, German communists attempted to seize control of the city, but they were soon beaten back and massacred by armed paramilitary groups of right-wing extremists, the Freikorps.
Himmler’s sympathies lay firmly with the Freikorps, but he had a future to think about. He was eager to escape from under his father’s large thumb and talked of studying agriculture, a career he likely saw as a ticket to someplace far away. He even considered becoming a colonist in Eastern Europe, a destination that might just as well have been at the end of the earth for a boy who had never traveled more than fifty miles from his birthplace.30 His father, who must have hoped for a grander career for his son, something more suited to the family’s lofty royal connections, eventually consented to the plan. He had begun to worry apparently about Heinrich’s unhealthy attraction to right-wing politics; agricultural studies, he must have hoped, would take his son’s mind off the Freikorps.31
So Himmler enrolled at what is now called the Technical University of Munich, attending classes in chemistry, physics, and botany. In the evenings, he cultivated new friends. He took dance lessons to master the Boston waltz, went skating, attended a costume ball as an Arab sultan, and mooned for a while over a young woman who was in love with someone else. He joined a fraternity, learned how to fence, and took part in a friendly duel that left him with a few small scars—a long-standing fraternity tradition among German university students.32 In his diary, he regularly chided himself for talking too much at social gatherings. He was becoming garrulous.
He argued heatedly with his father about money.33 There was suddenly very little to go around anywhere, as Germany struggled to meet the Allies’ heavy demand for war reparations. In a doomed attempt to pay the mammoth bill, the new Weimar Republic churned out more and more paper money. The result was something that economists clinically call hyperinflation, but that ordinary people recognized at once as utter madness. In just one year, between June 1922 and June 1923, prices in Germany soared 10,000 percent. Over the next five months, they exploded, shooting up more than 10,000,000 percent. Factory managers began paying their employees once a day, and providing a short break immediately after handing over the cash. The workers then tore off frantically to the nearest shops to spend the entire packet before prices rose further. In the streets, people stole anything of value, even brass fittings, and upper-middle-class families such as the Himmlers watched in despair. Their savings had evaporated into thin air, and they were forced to scrimp and cut corners like everyone else.
In Munich, right-wing extremists found the atmosphere of panic very conducive to recruiting. They papered the city with posters, announcing evening speeches in the Festsäle of the city’s huge beer halls. There, demobilized soldiers and newly impoverished tradesmen, teachers, students, and white-collar workers rubbed shoulders, draining great earthenware steins of foamy beer as they listened to, heckled, and applauded the political pitchmen. Munich was a cauldron of ultraright sentiment, and those who drank from this poisonous brew increasingly turned their ire on the struggling Weimar government and on an imaginary conspiracy of Jewish bankers and businessmen said to be profiting merrily from the misery of the German people.
One of the most strident of these pitchmen was Adolf Hitler, a young Austrian artist, drifter, and former soldier. Often dressed in heavy boots, a plain dark suit, white shirt, and a leather waistcoat, Hitler did not strike an imposing figure. He resembled, as one close associate of the day later remarked, “a waiter in a railway station restaurant.”34 But the young political leader possessed a talent for powerful oratory. Speaking in rented halls, he attracted a small but intensely loyal following for what was soon to be known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. His thuggish supporters regularly took to the Munich streets, armed with heavy rubber truncheons and looking for trouble—which they often found. “The Jew with flat feet and hooked nose and crinkly hair,” they chanted, “he dare not breathe our German air? Throw him out!”35
On one particularly memorable evening in February 1920, at Munich’s most famous beer hall, the Hofbräuhaus, Hitler took the stage in front of a large audience of two thousand men standing shoulder to shoulder. As a throng of communists and socialists shouted insults from the rear—only to be assaulted and beaten and silenced by Hitler’s ham-fisted supporters—he spoke for nearly four hours, delivering his party’s platform. Hitler promised to unite all Germans—no matter where they resided, whether in Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland—in a Greater Germany and tear up the hated Treaty of Versailles. He planned to forge a strong new army and execute citizens he deemed traitors. He proposed to censor the press and take control of Germany’s entire cultural system, beginning with the schools. Most ominously of all perhaps, he intended to extend the privilege of German citizenship only to those possessing German blood: no Jews would be allowed.
Like many other young right-wing supporters in Munich, Himmler was greatly drawn to these proposals, redolent as they were of rewriting history and wiping out the shame of the recent war. Moreover, he agreed that some action had to be taken against the Jews. His parents had not particularly raised him as a virulent anti-Semite, but as early as 1919, he had begun to explore what he and many others called “the Jewish question.”36 He wanted to appear coldly rational in his views—a character trait that became his trademark in later years—so he initially dismissed writers who approached the subject of Jews emotionally, from a position of blind hatred. Himmler needed the pretense of reason, and in early February 1922, he came across a booklet entitled Rasse und Nation (“Race and Nation”). The British-born author, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was the son-in-law of Richard Wagner and had sopped up the family’s intense anti-Semitism. Himmler read Chamberlain’s elaborate rationales with great interest. They supplied, as he later noted in his booklist, “a truth that convinces you that it is objective and not filled with hatred and anti-Semitism. This is why it is so much more successful. This awful Jewry.”37
Himmler took out a membership in the Nazi party in the summer of 1923, a year after graduating from the Technical University. His father greatly disapproved—he supported the Bavarian People’s Party, a more moderate Catholic group—but Himmler remained adamant.38 That November, Hitler and a group of fellow conspirators attempted to seize power in Bavaria with a haphazard putsch. Himmler eagerly offered his services as a combatant, manning a barricade with his brother outside Munich’s War Ministry building, but the plot ended in failure. Bavarian authorities charged Hitler with high treason and outlawed the Nazi party.
The failed coup did little to dampen Himmler’s newfound ardor, however. He went to work in the summer of 1924 as an organizer for a local Nazi party boss from Landshut, a chemist named Gregor Strasser. It was Himmler’s job to help build up one of the ultraright groups, the National Socialist Freedom Movement, that had suddenly sprouted up to replace the Nazi party. Weedy as Himmler looked, he seemed a born organizer. In his private life, he was accustomed to jotting down the exact time of day, sometimes down to the precise minute, when he received letters and birthday greetings from friends and family members, and this mania for record keeping set him apart from other party recruits.
In 1925, Strasser made Himmler his deputy in Bavaria, Swabia, and the Palatinate. It was an important step up the political ladder for a young Nazi official, particularly after the Bavarian prime minister released Hitler from prison in 1925 and lifted the ban on the Nazi party, observing with reckless optimism that the “wild beast is checked; we can afford to loosen the chain.”39
Himmler took his new responsibilities very seriously, and when the first volume of Hitler’s political autobiography Mein Kampf came out in 1925, he quickly picked up a copy.40 Many other party members, entranced by Hitler’s oratory, eagerly bought the book as well. They flipped through the first few pages and swiftly lost interest in their leader’s disjointed ramblings—on the evils of Communism, the dangers of syphilis, the foppishness of modern fashions, the menace of an international Zionist conspiracy, the magic of the Wagnerian opera Parsifal, the merits of boxing, the perils of racial mixing, the degeneration of modern art, and the necessity of correctly educating the young. But Himmler read both volumes avidly. “There are a tremendous number of truths in it,” he later noted approvingly in his booklist.41
One section of Mein Kampf delved into a subject particularly near to Himmler’s heart: the greatness of Germany’s ancestors. Privately, Himmler liked nothing better than to while away the hours reading historical novels or historical nonfiction. One-third of the books noted on his booklist before February 1927, when he finished the second volume of Mein Kampf, explored the past.42 Imaginatively and intellectually, Himmler lived in a world inhabited by the dead—feudal lords and kings, soldiers and peasants, Teutonic knights and Roman emperors—and he must have felt a shock of pleasure when he realized just how much Hitler shared this interest.
In the pages of Mein Kampf, Germany’s future Führer described for his readers what he saw as the noble antecedents to modern Germans. These progenitors, he explained, were the ancient Aryans, and all humanity lay forever in their debt:
All human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word ‘man.’ He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth. Exclude him—and perhaps after a few thousand years darkness will again descend on the earth, human culture will pass, and the world turn to a desert.43
Himmler was enthralled by this vision of the past. The fact that it was purely fictional—a work of imagination—did not seem to cross his mind.