21. THOR’S HAMMER

IN ALL THE YEARS Hitler had known Himmler, he had always counted upon the younger man’s deep, unwavering sense of loyalty. Since the two men had met in Bavaria in the mid-1920s, Hitler had come to recognize his subordinate’s remarkable skills as an administrator and his zealous dedication to Nazi party doctrine. But what finally bound the two men irrevocably together was Himmler’s personal allegiance. He had guarded Hitler’s life assiduously from assassins and built a personal bodyguard service, the SS, which was second to none. He had daily carried out Hitler’s dirty work—the mass executions, the liquidations, the slaughter—without objection. His fealty seemed beyond question—so much so in fact that Hitler had entrusted one of the most dangerous weapons of the Nazi state, the police, to Himmler alone.

Moreover, as the war dragged on, and as the early victories turned sour, Hitler had heaped new powers on der treue Heinrich, “loyal Heinrich.” He named Himmler Germany’s new interior minister in the summer of 1943. The following year, he placed him in charge of the Reserve Army, then called the People’s Militia, which proceeded to conscript all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty not already in military service. His faith in Himmler’s ability to get a tough job done seemed unshakable. In November 1944, he had handed him a major military post, appointing him commander in chief of the Army Group Upper Rhine, responsible for holding a key German bridgehead south of Strassburg and west of the Rhine.

By early 1945, the clerkish-looking SS leader had emerged as the second most powerful man in the Reich, far outstripping Göring, Goebbels, and Bormann. With each new appointment, Himmler’s hopes for personal advancement grew and he dreamed of one day inheriting Hitler’s empire. As such, he stubbornly searched for a way—any way—of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

HIMMLER HAD NEVER forgotten the old Norse legends that his father had once read to him, the tales of Thor and his magical weapon, a deadly hammer that struck like lightning. He had persuaded himself long ago that the Edda was literal truth and that Thor’s hammer was in fact a sophisticated piece of electrical engineering developed by Aryans to vanquish their enemies. So in November 1944, Himmler directed his staff to examine a bizarre plan to build a modern version of Thor’s hammer—a mammoth electrical weapon capable of shutting down all the electrical systems of Allied troops, from their radio communications and radar to the ignitions of their tanks.¹

A great irony lay in this last-minute quest to develop a wonder weapon to save Germany from its enemies. Some two and a half years earlier, in February 1942, the Reich Research Council had organized a private daylong presentation in Berlin on uranium. One of the speakers, Nobel Laureate physicist Werner Heisenberg, had described for the audience the process of nuclear fission and the devastating potential of an atomic bomb. Pure uranium-235, Heisenberg observed, is “an explosive of quite unimaginable force,” something that had occurred to many nuclear physicists. To harness this power, he noted, American scientists were apparently “pursuing this line of research with particular urgency.”²

Building a German atomic bomb would cost billions of reichsmarks, however, and require the expertise of many thousands of German scientists and technicians. To gather support for the idea, the Reich Research Council had sent Himmler and many other high-ranking Nazis personal invitations to attend the February 1942 meeting. But a secretary at the council had mistakenly tucked a program for another, far more technical meeting into the envelope. As a result, Himmler and his colleagues turned down the invitation, fearing a tedious day of it, and Heisenberg’s ideas for a potent new explosive failed to win broad support in the Nazi leadership.³ When Albert Speer raised the idea of such a bomb with Hitler a few months later, he shrugged it off, seeing little to be gained.⁴ The idea, noted Speer, “quite obviously strained his intellectual capacity.”⁵ And the project suffered a further heavy blow over the next year and a half, as Allied saboteurs and bombers incapacitated a heavy-water plant in Norway needed to produce weapons-grade raw material for the bomb. So it was that Germany failed to develop a major atomic weapon.⁶

As a result, Himmler turned at the end of the war to a far-fetched scheme for a bizarre electrical weapon. An obscure German company, Elemag, had put the plan forward in mid-November 1944. According to the firm’s engineers, existing technology could be used to transform the earth’s atmosphere into a giant remote-control device capable of flipping the switch on the Allies’ electrical equipment. “It is established,” explained the Elemag engineers, “that by removing the insulating effect of the atmosphere, one makes it impossible for any electrical device of a familiar construction and implementation to function. The present state of technology offers the possibility of influencing the insulating material of the atmosphere for the task at hand. It is well known that ultra-shortwave electrical vibrations of certain frequencies also develop the ability to ionize the atmosphere they permeate, thus causing a reverse electrical reaction. In other words, they transform the insulating material of the atmosphere into a voltage conductor.”⁷

Himmler eagerly referred this proposal to his SS technical office. Aware no doubt of the Reichsführer’s peculiar interests, the SS scientists examined the proposal carefully. As Himmler waited, he could not refrain from boasting to associates such as Adolf Eichmann and others about a new weapon that would render the Allies literally powerless. His personal physician, Felix Kersten, recalled one such occasion:

When I returned to Himmler’s headquarters in December I found him singularly optimistic. Once again he was prophesizing a German victory!

Germany was in ruins, the bombardment was ever more intense, Germany was almost encircled—and Himmler was talking of victory! I could hardly believe my ears.

One day, in a particularly expansive mood, he hinted at the reason for this presumably unfounded optimism.… “Very soon we shall put our last secret weapon into use. And that will change the war situation entirely.”⁸

The SS technical office mulled over the blueprints for the giant voltage conductor for weeks, searching, it seems, for some way to deliver the bad news to Himmler. But on January 8, it was forced to issue its verdict. The mammoth remote control was simply a fantasy—one well beyond Germany’s capabilities. Indeed, the SS staff warned, “all the means to be made available [to the research] would have to be designated as lost in advance.”⁹

Himmler, however, refused to believe it. Despite all his heavy responsibilities as a military commander, all the briefings and field reports, all the tactical and strategic planning with his officers, he immediately dispatched the proposal to Dr. Werner Oseberg, head of the planning office of the Reich Research Council, requesting another opinion. Oseberg, accustomed to dealing with serious physicists, must have been astounded by the document crossing his desk. But he clearly understood the importance that Himmler placed on the plan. He referred the matter to two prominent German scientists—one of whom was an expert on electromagnetic waves.

All three men submitted their reports in early February. The idea of such an electrical weapon, noted Oseberg dryly, “is unrealizable, given the present stage of technology. Elemag’s statements themselves lack any deep understanding of the technological and physical processes involved.”¹⁰

BY THE END of March 1945, Allied bombers had reduced much of Berlin and Munich to smoking heaps of debris, leaving inhabitants to fend as best they could. Total destruction seemed only a few weeks away. In the west, Allied troops had bridged the Rhine and were now driving hard toward Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr Valley. Toward the east, the Soviet army was preparing to cross the Oder River, less than one hundred kilometers from Berlin. The city’s inhabitants shuddered to think what would happen then. For weeks, they had seen and heard terrible reports of the vengeance that Soviet troops were taking as they moved westward, burning and looting German homes, beating and gang-raping German women as a payback for the atrocities Hitler’s forces had committed on Soviet soil. Some of these reports were frighteningly accurate.¹¹

Safe for the time being in his new field headquarters—a convalescent hospital just outside Berlin whose roof was conveniently painted with red crosses—Himmler had begun examining his own options. As a military commander, he had failed to live up to Hitler’s expectations, and much to his humiliation, he had been relieved of his army group command—not, however, before receiving the full brunt of Hitler’s fury. This failure and the hard words that had followed had greatly strained the old understanding between the two men. Hitler had found Himmler seriously lacking as a subordinate, and now that defeat was looming, Himmler had begun to seriously question Hitler’s judgment, his military acumen, and his fitness to serve as Germany’s leader. In defeat, they had fallen out like a pair of wolves.

Hitler, after all, was prepared to go down in flames like an old Norse god, taking all Germany with him if need be. He angrily refused to capitulate to the enemy, no matter what terms might be offered. Himmler, however, wanted to live and he had already coldly turned his mind to a future without Hitler.¹² Indeed, he hoped to play a pivotal role in postwar Europe. He believed he could persuade the Allies to overlook his terrible crimes by handing over to them some of his SS divisions, thereby bringing the war to a speedier end. Himmler had grown accustomed to power, and he desperately hoped to hold on to it, perhaps as the new anti-Communist leader of Germany.¹³ If that meant betraying Hitler, the man he had served so obediently for nearly two decades, then he was fully prepared to do so. Already, he had dispatched a secret proposal to the western Allies.¹⁴ They had briskly turned it down, but he intended to try again.

As he stewed over the future in his field headquarters, however, Himmler followed the reports from the battle lines carefully. In the final days of March 1945, he realized with grim certainty that the Americans would soon capture Wewelsburg, the SS castle where Wiligut had once pontificated on ancient runes. He was loath to let the castle, his Nordic academy for senior SS officers, pass into enemy hands. So on March 30, he ordered Wewelsburg’s staff to evacuate, leaving behind only a detachment of SS guards.¹⁵ A day later, at three in the afternoon, a member of Himmler’s personal entourage, SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinz Macher, appeared in the village with a small demolition squad.

Macher ordered his men to place dynamite in the castle’s west and south towers, as well as in two other adjoining staff buildings.¹⁶ But the squad lacked what was needed to blow up the entire building, since the SS was running short of explosives. So Macher instructed his men to set fire to the curtains and other flammables. As flames began to dart from the windows, the SS officer set off the charges. The two towers buckled and sagged, then slumped in a dense cloud of dust and debris. From the safety of their homes, residents of the adjacent village of Wewelsburg peered out at the spectacle. Macher and his men then finished off the work, firing antitank grenades at the stronghold, and after leveling as much as they could, they and the remaining SS guards departed for Paderborn. Just two hours had elapsed since they arrived.

The villagers waited until Macher and his men were safely out of sight. Then they began pillaging the burning castle. In the last hours of daylight and over the next two days, they scrambled across halls and up burning staircases to plunder guest rooms, libraries, workshops, storage rooms, kitchens, and, of course, Himmler’s own personal study. They helped themselves to expensive carpets and carved chairs, inlaid tables and china plates decorated with Wiligut’s faux runic symbols. Some broke into the castle’s sprawling wine cellar, which was reputed to stock nearly forty thousand bottles, many almost certainly stolen from the finest cellars of Europe. As Wewelsburg burned, the revelers grabbed bottles of champagne, Bordeaux, port, and schnapps, breaking so many on the way back up the narrow staircase that they had literally to slop through puddles of wine, their pant cuffs stained a deep red.¹⁷

Others stumbled upon what remained of the castle’s museum—a glorified ancestor room to educate the SS leadership in the ways of their Aryan forebears.¹⁸ Since the beginning of the war, Himmler had added dramatically to its collections, acquiring crates of plundered artifacts—from Viking swords and golden helmets to Bronze Age belts, mirrors, Scythian bronze arrowheads, and classical Greek terra-cotta figurines.¹⁹ In addition, foreign governments had learned that the surest way to curry favor with Himmler was to present him with a rare antiquity. When the new Fascist regime of Spain wanted to court his support, for example, the Spanish foreign minister bestowed upon him a pair of artifacts excavated from an old West Goth grave in Segovia.²⁰

Wewelburg’s staff had taken pains to hide some, if not all, of these antiquities, knowing that the Allies were closing in. They ordered false walls to be built in a former Augustinian monastery known as Gut Böddeken, located a few kilometers from Wewelsburg, and stowed an unknown quantity of prehistoric treasures behind them.²¹ But in the chaos that followed the abrupt departure of Himmler’s troops from the region, someone seems to have divulged the location of this secret cache. Looters soon descended.

The first American troops reached the charred ruins of Wewelsburg on April 2 and occupied the village the following day. They picked up a few odd souvenirs from inside the razed castle—a box of silver rings here, an SS typewriter there—and saw the splintered remains of a large reptilian fossil in the courtyard. But there was little sign of the treasure that the castle had once housed. And there were few valuables remaining at the old monastery of Bddeken. When Allied art experts arrived to inventory what was left from Himmler’s plunder in hopes of returning it to its rightful owners, they found only a small pile of swords, shields, crossbows, and ancient helmets, all that remained of Himmler’s prize collection of prehistoric weapons.²²

EARLY IN THE morning of May 1, Himmler received word that Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, had committed suicide in the bunker below the Chancellery building in Berlin. Although Himmler had once hoped to be named Hitler’s successor, the German leader had coldly passed him over. Hitler had learned from a series of foreign media reports a few days earlier that Himmler had betrayed him. The SS chief had entered into private negotiations with the western Allies, offering to bring the war to a quick end—something Himmler believed he could enforce.²³ At first Hitler could scarcely believe the news. But as he mulled over the way that he had been mollified and gulled by Himmler, he had exploded with fury, calling it “the most shameful betrayal in human history.”²⁴ Soon after, he had named Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor.

Dönitz, the commander in chief of the German navy, was as surprised as any by this choice, but unlike his predecessor, he did not intend to stand back watching Germany’s annihilation. He transferred his headquarters to a naval cadet school near Flensburg, not far from the Danish border, and dispatched his representatives to France to see General Dwight Eisenhower. He wanted to sue for peace. On May 7, 1945, his representatives signed Germany’s official unconditional surrender, and the following night at eleven o’clock all hostilities officially ceased.

In the last months of the war, the Allies had agreed among themselves to establish an international military tribunal to try Germany’s major war criminals. Although Hitler had escaped arrest, the other senior Nazi leaders were still at large, and the Allies were determined to bring them to justice. At the top of their list was the man who had meticulously planned, down to the last finicky detail, the industrialized slaughter of Jews and others categorized as enemies of the Reich. Well aware of this, Himmler began making plans to escape. He had already pocketed the identification card of a field police officer, Heinrich Hitzinger. He now shaved off his mustache, removed his famous glasses, slung a black patch over his right eye, and assumed Hitzinger’s identity.

For the first few days, he kept to himself at Flensburg, where he had brought his young mistress Hedwig Potthast and their two children.²⁵ On May 10, however, he decided to strike out south with a small entourage. Several of his senior SS officers had already departed for the Alps, where they planned to launch a new Nazi guerilla movement, code name Werwolf. Himmler, it seems, had decided to cast his lot in with Werwolf. He donned civilian clothes and set off by automobile with his personal administrative officer, Dr. Rudolf Brandt, and a few other senior SS officers.

The small group crossed a bridge over the Elbe River without attracting the suspicion of guards, then lit out on foot. Over the next week or so, the men lived on the lam, a novel experience for Himmler. They joined the churning floodtide of people on the roads—refugees and former soldiers, newly liberated slave laborers and recently freed concentration-camp prisoners—and at night they made their beds in farmers’ haylofts or slept on benches in railway stations. Meanwhile, Allied intelligence officers searched for Himmler. In the House of Commons in London, a member of the opposition asked Winston Churchill pointedly where the SS leader was. Churchill expertly deflected the question. “I expect he will turn up somewhere in this world or the next, and will be dealt with by the appropriate local authorities. The latter of them would be the more convenient to His Majesty’s Government.”²⁶

On May 21, British troops stopped three German field police at a bridge outside of Bremervörde, a small town west of Hamburg.²⁷ They failed to recognize Himmler, but they were under orders to arrest all German police officers and so they dispatched the trio to a nearby internment camp. Interrogators there found Himmler’s papers suspicious. The documents had been issued in Flensburg, where Dönitz and senior Nazi advisors had fled in the final days of the regime and where, according to recent reports from the Danish resistance, the SS leader had gone into hiding.²⁸ So the British sent him on to a second camp at Lüneburg.

By this time, however, Himmler had grown tired of all the skulking about. He had come up with a plan to offer Churchill the services of the Werwolf guerillas to aid in the coming fight against Communism in the East.²⁹ So after arriving at the Lüneburg camp on May 23, 1945, he told the guards who he was and asked to see the commanding officer, Captain Tom Selvester, who was apparently at lunch. As Himmler waited, he doffed the eyepatch and dug a pair of spectacles from his pocket and put them on. The transformation was startling. The British camp commander knew at once that he was speaking to Heinrich Himmler.

Selvester called in an intelligence officer to strip-search the prisoner. The examination produced two curiosities—small brass cylinders, each one-half inch long and about the diameter of a cigarette.³⁰ One of the cylinders was empty; the other contained a small blue-glass vial, most likely of poison. Two days earlier, a senior SS officer had killed himself by swallowing a hidden vial of cyanide. The intelligence officer then compared the prisoner’s signature to a known sample from Himmler, and asked Himmler a number of questions. Convinced that he was looking at one of the most notorious figures of the Nazi regime, the officer proceeded to show Himmler photographs of emaciated concentration-camp prisoners and the huge mounds of corpses that Allied troops had recently discovered at Buchenwald. Himmler merely glanced at the pictures and shrugged. “Am I responsible for the excesses of my subordinates?” he asked.³¹

That evening, Colonel Michael Murphy, chief of intelligence on the staff of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, took custody of the prisoner. He shoved Himmler roughly into a car, and drove him to an interrogation center just outside Lüneberg. There he curtly ordered Himmler to strip and directed an army medical doctor to conduct a second examination in hopes of retrieving a missing poison vial. Himmler undressed meekly enough, but the display of photos from Buchenwald and Murphy’s abusive manner seem to have unsettled him, revealing all too clearly the futility of offering Werwolf’s services to Churchill. He had at last run out of options. There was no future but ignominy at the hands of his captors, no escape but death.

The army doctor peered into Himmler’s mouth. He thought he saw something dark lodged in the lower molars. He beckoned Himmler toward better light and positioned his head for a better look. But Himmler suddenly wriggled free, snapping his mouth shut and grinding the cyanide capsule between his teeth. He quickly lost consciousness. Horrified by the turn of events, Murphy and an associate hoisted Himmler upside down by his legs, and shook him frantically. Then the army doctor tried pumping his stomach. But the prisoner did not regain consciousness. Heinrich Himmler, the chief architect of the Holocaust, had stopped breathing. He was pronounced dead at 11:04 P.M.³²

FOR TWO DAYS, Himmler’s body lay on the floor in Lüneburg. Russian and American officials traipsed by and peered down at it to confirm the identification, then a medical person appeared and made plaster casts of Himmler’s head and removed his brain and took it away.³³ Finally, a British officer wrapped Himmler’s body up in camouflage netting knotted with army telephone wire, and hauled it out to a truck with the help of a few soldiers.³⁴ Together they drove to the nearby wilderness of Lüneberg Heath, where they dug a hole and secretly buried Himmler in an unmarked grave.

They left nothing behind for Nazi loyalists to turn into a shrine.