History, it has been said, is all too often a fable agreed upon. Far underneath myth and legend, in any given period, there is a certain kernel of fact; men did thus and so, they were acted upon by this and that compelling motive, and what they did had certain concrete results. But the exact sequence of events and the chain of causation that went with that sequence have a way of getting lost; the myth-makers get busy, and a later generation may find itself consenting to a fable simply because the time when the truth might have been verified was allowed to pass.
This has a peculiar relevancy to our own times, in testimony of which there is presently available a grim and profoundly disturbing book called The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945, written by Gerald Reitlinger.
The myth which Mr. Reitlinger undertakes to destroy is the belief that Hitler’s SS, under the satanic guidance of Heinrich Himmler, was a state within a state—a compact, ruthless, and murderously efficient Praetorian Guard which terrorized not only the weak and helpless but the strong and mighty as well, compelling bureaucrats, army officers, and everyone else to go along with the most dreadful program of cruelty and murder in all human history. Men of good will were unable to stand before it; against their own inclinations, they consented to an infinity of crimes because they could not do anything else, and no one but the inner circle of SS leaders ever knew the night-marish things which the SS was actually doing.
This, says Mr. Reitlinger, just is not true. The SS (of which the infamous Gestapo was a subordinate unit) did indeed commit the frightful acts of which it stands accused, but it did not commit them without help. It elevated terror to an instrument of national policy, but the terror came down on those who were in no position to defend themselves. Men who could have refused to go along did not refuse; men in no way compelled to work with the SS did work with it, and the whole campaign of mass extermination—which claimed, quite literally, millions of wholly innocent victims—was a matter of common knowledge throughout the government and military hierarchy.
But the myth remains, and it can be damaging. As Mr. Reitlinger remarks, it is becoming the great alibi for a whole nation; it permits men who have a direct share in one of the blackest chapters in all history to deny their own responsibility. It falsifies the record, and this kind of falsification is in the highest degree dangerous.
The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945, by Gerald Reitlinger. The Viking Press. 502 pp. $6.50.
Originally, the SS was the inner bodyguard set up in a revolutionary armed mob. But by the middle of 1934, says Mr. Reitlinger, its original excuse for existence had gone. Logically, it might then have become the kernel of a new citizen army. This did not happen, however, because Hitler in fact did not make a revolution. “There never,” says the author, “was a less revolutionary person than Adolf Hitler, who sacked Social Credit theorists and appointed bank managers in their place and who murdered a Roehm only to establish a Blomberg.” He kept the trappings of revolution, but retained the army and the ministries; set up to perform the dirty work of a revolutionary government (like the MVD and its predecessor agencies in Russia), the SS operated under this difference—there had been no revolution.
So the SS became many things, and it all added up to a weird administrative monstrosity. By the end of the war it was engaged in a whole welter of unrelated activities: it had offices for archaeological and ancestral research, offices which collected skulls and skeletons of “sub-human” races, and offices which ran baby farms; it forged bank notes, collected information on alchemy and astrology, supervised the cultivation of medicinal herbs and wild rubber plants, ran such things as a mineral-water factory and a shop for the production of porcelain; it published books, and it operated various night clubs in foreign capitals. It sheltered an overblown wartime bureaucracy so complex that a former official finally confessed that it was all but impossible for any outsider to find his way about in its maze of offices. It had hundreds upon hundreds of subsections, one of which—innocently titled Bureau IVA, 4b—was responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews.
Unraveling this tangled skein is a laborious task, to which Mr. Reitlinger brings the remorseless methods of the objective historian; and (as it seems to this reviewer, at any rate) he proves, right up to the hilt, that the SS was not operating behind a curtain or performing its tasks without the knowledge and consent of the rest of the administrative setup. “Himmler’s police leaders in Russia,” says Mr. Reitlinger, “could call on the Rear Area Commands of the army to supply any units available for the war against partisans, and these operations, conducted by regular troops, were often nothing else than mass executions of the Jewish population.”
The allied prosecutors at Nuremberg tried to segregate the leaders of the SS and to exact some sort of retribution for what had been done, but they had little notion how complicated their assignment really was. For, the author concludes:
“It is not realised how little the Gestapo was an independent agency, and how much its powers depended on the co-operation of the entire German bureaucracy. It is not realised that the massive machinery, by which more than four million Jews were dragged from their homes to die in often very distant concentration camps, ghettos, and gas chambers, could never have been handled by a single obscure department of the Gestapo, could never have been secret and could not have happened at all without the minute interlocking of the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministries of Transport, Finance, and Economics, the two High Command Offices, the Ministries of Labour and Armaments, and above all the Foreign Office.”
Here, in other words, is a historian coming in before the myths have really hardened to insist that the history of this particular part of our times must not become one of those agreed-upon fables. He has been compelled to grope about in some of the muddiest waters which a frequently sinful and misguided human race ever stirred up, but he has done his task ably and his book is of substantial value.
A Mild Murderer
By BRUCE CATTON
The horrid fascination which the Hitler epoch exerts on inquiring minds extends to the personalities involved; and the oddest of all the odd lot of queer fish who swam across that scene must by all accounts be the man who built up and operated the SS, Heinrich Himmler himself. If no man is a hero to his valet, no man is likely to be a hero to his masseur, either, and it is Dr. Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur, who presents this picture of him. It is as weird a picture as you are likely to find in all the literature of Hitler’s Germany.
Himmler suffered from some sort of stomach cramps, which assailed him every so often with agonizing, incapacitating pains. As a “manual therapist,” or masseur, Dr. Kersten was able to give him relief. He became, presently, a sort of captive court physician to the man who ran Hitler’s apparatus of terror, and for five years he held a position of strange influence over Himmler. No one else could relieve Himmler’s pains; so, after a time, there was very little that Dr. Kersten could ask for which Himmler would not readily give him. Being a person whose humane instincts had not been stunted by contact with the Nazi tyranny, Dr. Kersten made use of his position to save people from extermination; in the long run he kept thousands of people—Jews, Germans, and citizens of occupied lands—from the gas chambers.
Indeed, if Himmler was the greatest mass murderer in all history, Dr. Kersten must have been one of the greatest lifesavers. Mr. Trevor-Roper, who has dug about as deeply into the Nazi story as anyone, attests to the genuineness of his work. The World Jewish Congress, says H. R. Trevor-Roper, credits Dr. Kersten with rescuing no fewer than 60,000 Jews; and in 1941, when Hitler coolly proposed to transport three million Dutchmen to the dreary wastes of Polish Galicia and the Ukraine, it was Dr. Kersten who talked Himmler out of it. (He persuaded him that the additional strain on his health would probably be fatal; after all, an operation of that size would involve a lot of work and nervous strain.) It is only fair to say that Himmler later was sorry that he had not obeyed orders; it was all the fault, he said, “of my wretched health and the good Dr. Kersten.”
Which is as it may be; but somehow the chief interest in this book—and it really is absorbingly interesting—lies less in Dr. Kersten’s recital of the way in which he saved people’s lives than in the fantastic picture he presents of the completely incomprehensible Himmler himself.
The picture, one hastens to add, is of necessity somewhat lopsided. Dr. Kersten, who was never under any illusion about what the man was really up to, nevertheless saw him from a rather special angle. The Himmler he saw was a somewhat fatuous, bumbling, almost grandfatherly man.
The Kersten Memoirs, 1940–1945, by Felix Kersten, with an introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper; translated from the German by Constantine Fitzgibbon and James Oliver. The Macmillan Company. 314 pp. $5.
That this is an accurate picture is open to substantial doubt. The same Himmler who—troubled by stomach pains and anxious to repay the favor to the manipulator who could make the stomach pains go away—could without much coaxing agree to spare the lives of three million Netherlander, was also the same Himmler who could send three million other persons to their deaths without batting an eye. Furthermore, the infighting among the various Nazi bigwigs during the period when the Nazis were counting on a thousand years as their own particular future tended now and then to get a little rugged; and in this infighting Herr Himmler always managed to come up with survival and additional power clenched in his own flabby hands, which is not the mark of a well-meaning bumbler. He was a man who could shake his head sadly over the inhumanity of a Goering, who liked to shoot innocent, inoffensive deer; he was also the man who, without giving the matter a second thought, could order the extermination of innumerable men, women, and children.
Still, there it is—this mild, soft-spoken, dismayingly jellyfish-like creature who killed more fellow humans than any other man whose name can easily be called to mind, did manage to have—in a queer, abstract, unreal way, not to be translated into terms that a really sane mind could grasp—an instinct for the things of the spirit. He was quite capable of saying, as Dr. Kersten quotes him:
“A man has to sacrifice himself, even though it is often very hard for him; he oughtn’t to think of himself. … 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 … and be able to dedicate myself to positive achievements only!”
Perhaps that expresses the real horror which the personality of Himmler inspires. The world has had its maniacal killers before, from the Assyrian kings on down, and they are usually men of blood and iron, rejoicing in cruelty, visibly dedicated to destruction. To find one who would not, if he could help it, hurt a fly and who would greatly prefer to tend his flower garden and guide the people in religious observances, dedicating all that he has to the service of his fellow men—this is the ultimate twist of the screw, this is the thing that could only come from the final depths.
History Perverted
By BRUCE CATTON
The story is not yet complete. Mr. Reitlinger indicates where the historian’s responsibility lies, and Dr. Kersten presents a slice of the miserable material with which the historian is obliged to work. It remains to take a look at the way in which history wrongly written and basely interpreted can twist the life of a whole nation out of shape.
We stick with the boys in the jackboots—the blackshirts. The exhibit now is a work called Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny, by Edward Crankshaw, which rounds out the picture presented by the two previous books and which is yet another chapter in the strange tale of bits and pieces which the historian has to bear in mind. Mr. Crankshaw is concerned, basically, with the hideous things that can happen to a people who have perverted history, who know everything about the past except what it really means, who can study history devoutly without ever once realizing that it is really the story of actual, flesh-and-blood human beings.
This book is in a way a blend of the other two. It picks up one of the subsections of the SS—the world-dreaded Gestapo—for intimate examination, and it also concerns itself directly with Himmler himself; and its impact is perhaps the greatest of the three because it makes explicit some of the things that come out of the other two books only as overtones.
There is no real disagreement here. Mr. Crankshaw comes to very much Mr. Reitlinger’s conclusion, and he states it explicitly:
“… the Gestapo did not function as a dark and sinister tyranny, compact and aloof, ruling first Germany, then most of Europe, alone, in secrecy, and unobserved; but, once absolute power had been achieved, merged itself inextricably with the general mood of Germany as a whole, so that in occupied Europe, especially in the East, it is hard to separate the cruelties of the Gestapo and the S.D. from the cruelties of the Wehrmacht. …”
All of which is true enough. Mr. Crankshaw traces the rise of the Gestapo and shows what Himmler had to do with it (and it should be noted that Himmler is not quite the grandfatherly humbler which Dr. Kersten sometimes makes him appear; he was a canny operator who knew at all times precisely what he was up to) and he presents a record which, because it is so compact and so readable, is perhaps the most damning indictment yet put on paper. But he sounds in addition an eloquent note of warning: “… we are clearly going about things the wrong way if we allow ourselves to start with the assumption that only Germans could behave in the manner recorded in these pages.”
Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny, by Edward Crankshaw. The Viking Press. 275 pp. $3.75.
The Germans had studied history; no people ever studied it more intensively. Yet what they finally got out of it seems to have been something bloodless, a tracing of lines of destiny, a history told in terms of national survival and national defeat. Nowhere in it was the breathing reality of the individual human being made manifest. In a crisis, then, this nation could adopt wholesale slaughter as an instrument for survival, simply because its historians had never hinted that the people who were going to be slaughtered were, after all, people. What followed was, as Mr. Crankshaw puts it, “a rejection of that reality which includes one’s neighbours,” with a false abstraction substituted for reality.
Any history can do this to any people once it ceases to deal with human beings and deals with abstractions. This, perhaps, is the real lesson of the whole miserable business. Here in America we might perhaps begin by reflecting that those atomic bombs we dropped did fall on living human beings. They did not just explode in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they exploded in the heart of mankind. The historian does not need to turn moralist in order to point this out, but somewhere along the line he does have some sort of moral responsibility. He is talking about men and women.
