Chilling letters to wife end with Himmler signing off "I’m off to Auschwitz. Kisses. Yours, Heini"
Evil pair: Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler
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It is a simple sign-off in a love letter from husband to wife – but
just a few words betray the brutal and horrific reality of the author’s
day job... “I’m off to Auschwitz. Kisses. Yours, Heini.”
For Heini
is Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief who ordered the extermination of six
million Jews during the Second World War and grew to be one of Nazi
Germany’s most feared men.
And he was off to inspect the death
camp that saw more than 1.2million people slaughtered as part of the
Third Reich’s Final Solution.
A newly-discovered collection of
letters, diaries, notes and pictures –thought to have been lost forever –
has shed light on the private life of the man who organised the
Holocaust.
In his own words, Himmler reveals himself as an
insecure romantic fantasist who kept his mass murder programme from
those closest to him. He was happy to have millions killed, but did not
want to upset wife Marga with details of the horrors committed under his
command.
Himmler gives away only fragments of information about his role in the Nazi regime.
Letters and photos of his trips across German-occupied Europe were sent
home but the detail of what he was doing and what he experienced was
not. Family man: Himmler, his wife Marga and their loved ones
He leaves out the horrors of his mission to track down and
kill millions of Jews. And there is hardly a mention of the ghettos and
extermination camps he oversaw and which were manned by his SS and
police force.
Mass murderer and family man – Himmler
was both. He had millions of people executed and always felt “decent”
doing it, reveal the documents, which were published yesterday in the
German newspaper Die Welt.
As Himmler prepared for an inspection
of camps in occupied Poland in July, 1942 and a demonstration involving
the gassing of several hundred innocent people, he wrote mundanely:
“In
the next few days I’ll be in Lublin, Zamosc, Auschwitz, Lviv and then
in the new quarters. I’m curious if and how I will be able to phone, it
will probably be around 2000 kilometers to Gmund. All the best, have a
nice trip and enjoy your days with our little daughter. Many warm
greetings and kisses! Your Daddy.”
His favoured sign-offs to Marga
were “Euer Pappi” (Your Daddy) or “Dein Heini” (Your Heini) and he
would often address her as “My dear sweetheart” and “Dear Mummy”. Father figure: Letter to one of his children signed 'Pappi' (Daddy)
The pair met on a train from Munich to Berchtesgaden in 1927.
It was around the time the 26-year-old Himmler was put in charge of
Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s “protection squads”, the monstrous
Schutzstaffeln that would come to be known more commonly as the SS.
He
and his new love shared a pathological hatred of Jewish people, the
letters reveal. In early correspondence between the courting couple,
their radical anti-Semitism is stark. In the run-up to their 1928
wedding, Marga – who was seven years older than Himmler – writes of
“Jewish scum” that scared her. Later she simply referred to them as
scum.
Her fiance only encouraged her: “Poor Lovey, you have to deal with the miserable Jews because of money”.
When
Marga sold her shares in a private clinic to the Jewish co-owner Dr
Bernhard Hauschild, she wrote: “This Hauschild! A Jew will always be a
Jew!”
Himmler replied: “But don’t get worked up about the Jews, dear, dear woman, if I could only help you.”
Within
a decade, Himmler had grown to become one of the most sinister top
Nazis and was coordinating the Hitler regime’s sick ethnic policies.
He
orchestrated the attacks of November, 1938 – known as Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass – that saw Nazi stormtroopers ransack and
smash Jewish homes, hospitals, schools and synagogues.
At least 91
Jews were killed in the attacks, and 30,000 were locked away in
concentration camps. For many, it signalled the start of the Nazis’
Final Solution, the plan to exterminate Jews in Europe.
But even
that was not enough for Marga, who wrote in her diary: “This thing with
the Jews, when will this scum leave us so that we can lead a happy
life?”.
As Germany marks National Holocaust Day today, Himmler’s
love letters to Marga chart the rise and fall of the Third Reich before
he killed himself in British custody in Lüneburg, Germany on May 23,
1945. She played the good wife to Himmler, advising him not to forget
the “one can of caviar in the fridge” as Germany invaded supposed ally,
the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa would leave four million dead yet
Himmler complained: “I didn’t sleep well at all.”
And the mother
to their daughter, Gudrun, stayed by his side when he fathered two more
children with his mistress, Hedwig Potthast. News of the affair with
Potthast, Himmler’s private secretary, is said to have hurt Marga but
the SS leader justified it as “the reproductive duties of Aryan men”.
Himmler
kept his first family well stocked during a war that saw Germans
struggle to survive on pitiful rations. While normal Berlin households
made do spending 50-100 Reichsmarks a month, according to Marga’s
household accounts book she blew 500-1,300 marks, the equivalent of as
much as £16,000 today.
Himmler frequently sent treats in the post with chocolate, cheese and “150 tulips from Holland” finding their way home.
During
their early days together, the lovebirds frequently referred to each
other as “bad” and used the word “revenge” flirtatiously.
“I am so
fortunate I have a bad husband who loves his bad wife... as she loves
him,” Marga wrote. “The revenge - it will be fun,” he wrote to her on
January 9, 1928, while on a train to Munich. “I am nothing but revenge.
Forever,” he added. “My black soul thinks about impossible things.”
“We,
the thugs of the German struggle for freedom, are meant to be lonely
and banished,” he wrote to her on Christmas of 1927. And on December 30
of the same year, he wrote: “I can imagine the horror waiting for us in
the future, that sooner or later I will bring pain and suffering to the
dearest to my heart on Earth.”
Soon after, in January of 1928,
Marga called her husband, a “bad man with a hard and coarse heart”. In
response, he described her as a “small woman”.
The letters,
photos, memorandums - even a recipe book - of the ice-cold Himmler are
believed to have been taken from his home in Bavaria by two American
soldiers in 1945. They remained hidden until surfacing in the early
1980s in the hands of a Holocaust survivor who only ever hinted as to
how he got them. One version saw him buy them at a flea market in
Belgium while another claims Himmler’s confidant Karl Wolff sold them
on.
They eventually wound up with Belgian diamond dealer David
Lapa who gave them to his daughter Vanessa, a film director, whose
documentary about them is out next month.
In 2011, she approached
Die Welt and proposed that the material be published. In the three years
since, the paper has been authenticating the letters with the help of
the German Federal Archives.
The newspaper, which will publish
more over the next week, wrote that Himmler’s letters “reveal a lot
about the mindset of a cold-blooded, self-righteous bureaucrat, who
became the mastermind and chief organiser of the Holocaust.”
He might have been Heini to his wife, but the world will remember him as a monster.
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