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History A Jew Talks With Himmler by
Frank Fox In the spring of 1945, a lone ambassador
representing Europen Jewry flew from Copenhagen to Berlin in a plane emblazoned
with swastikas. His mission: to convince Heinrich Himmler to let his people
go.
Of all the extraordinary "summits" in history, an
incontestable place must be given to a two-hour wartime meeting on April 20, 1945
between Heinrich Himmler, the arch-killer of Jews, and Norbert Masur, Swedish
representative of the World Jewish Congress. As Allied armies closed in on Nazi
redoubts in the spring of 1945, Himmler, aware of Germany's desperate situation
(and his own), became more and more receptive to the idea of negotiating the
release of the ill and starving in concentration camps such as Ravensbrück.
The godfather for that extraordinary meeting was Felix Kersten, Himmler's masseur
whose "magical hands" had been indispensable to Himmler since 1939.
| | Frank
Fox is the author of "God's Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest
Massacre." |
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This was not the first time that Himmler tried to strike a deal behind
Hitler's back. Almost a year earlier, Kersten and Walter Schellenberg, the latter
since 1944 head of both the SS and Wehrmacht security apparatus, made a proposal
to the Allies that Himmler assumed they would not refuse. The aim was audacious
and bizarre. As Professor John H. Waller reveals in his 2002 book "The Devil's
Doctor: Felix Kersten and the Secret Plot to Turn Himmler," Himmler proposed
deposing Hitler. On March 20, 1944 General William J. Donovan, director of the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), passed on to President Roosevelt a message
from Sweden that Himmler considered ousting Hitler and negotiating peace with the
Allies in order to form a united front against the Soviet Union. Roosevelt and
Churchill wasted no time rejecting the offer. Time was running out for Nazi
leaders. On July 20, 1944 there was an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life and
the circle of opposition to Hitler was destroyed or under surveillance. Himmler
had to watch his every step. There was enough treachery for several Shakespearean
dramas.
The Summit at Gut Hartzwalde The meeting between Himmler and Masur took
place at Gut Hartzwalde, Kersten's estate, not far from the Ravensbrück camp
where starving and mutilated women were unaware that Himmler and Masur were
meeting to decide their fate. Originally Hillel Storch of the Swedish branch of
the Jewish World Congress was to meet with Himmler, but Masur was chosen instead.
According to Joseph Kessel in Les Mains de Miracle ("The Miraculous
Hands," 1960), Storch feared for his life. He had already lost 17 members of his
family in concentration camps. On Thursday, April 19, 1945, after Jewish
officials obtained a promise of safe passage, Masur received the long-awaited
invitation. Himmler was expecting him that evening. Masur and Kersten left for
Berlin on a regularly scheduled flight from Stockholm to Copenhagen, then boarded
another plane emblazoned with swastikas, hardly an auspicious symbol, as they
flew to Berlin through skies crossed regularly by Allied planes on their bombing
missions. Kersten referred to his companion, the visaless Masur, as a "dangerous
piece of contraband."
This was the historical adventure that Masur has described in
a booklet titled Ein Jude Talar Med Himmler ("A Jew Speaks with Himmler,"
1945), a rare document still not available in English.*
"It was a horrifying idea," he wrote a year after the meeting, "that I would
be confronted and negotiate with the man responsible for the extermination of
millions of Jews." After they circled over roofless Berlin, Masur witnessed the
destruction that became more visible as they drove from Tempelhof airport through
the city. Kersten's estate was some 30 miles north of Berlin, almost halfway to
the hell of Ravensbrück. The Gestapo vehicle drove with its lights dimmed
through the ghost-like ruins, past endless piles of rubble, the moonlit scene
pierced from time to time by searchlights seeking out Allied bombers. They
arrived at the estate before midnight to await Himmler.
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| At the stroke of 2:30
Himmler arrived, followed by his aide, Rudolf Brandt. Masur was relieved that he
was greeted with a Guten Tag, instead of a Heil Hitler.
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A birthday party in a Berlin bunker delayed the meeting. When Schellenberg
arrived the following morning to welcome Masur he explained that it was Hitler's
birthday, and Himmler could only come after the party. The meeting, he
emphasized, was dangerous for all concerned. Hitler was against the release of
any camp inmates and had been enraged the previous fall when Himmler agreed to
send 2,700 concentration camp survivors to Switzerland as a gesture of
conciliation to the Allies as Germany's war fortunes waned. Before long there was
another message from Himmler that he could not come until 2:30 in the morning.
They awaited him in candlelight since electricity was cut off as soon as the
air-raid sirens sounded. At the stroke of 2:30 Himmler arrived, followed by his
aide, Rudolf Brandt. Masur was relieved that he was greeted with a Guten
Tag, instead of a Heil Hitler. They all sat down to tea, coffee,
sugar, and cakes brought from Sweden, items in short supply in wartime Germany.
As Kersten reminisced: "Here round the table at my Hartzwalde house were
peacefully seated the representatives of two races who had been at daggers drawn,
each regarding the other as its mortal enemy. And this attitude had demanded the
sacrifice of millions; the shades of those dead hovered in the background. It was
a shattering reflection." No less shattering, to be sure, than the blindness in
Kersten's words of equivalence.
As Masur described him, Himmler was dressed in a well-fitted uniform,
decorations prominently displayed, his manner calm and self-controlled. Masur
could not believe that the man in front of him was history's worst mass murderer.
Himmler soon launched into a monologue. Like other Nazi leaders whose point of
reference was the defeat in World War I, he recalled that he was 14 when that war
began and he blamed the Spartacist uprising and Jews for the social upheavals
that followed. The Jews were a foreign element, he said, that had been driven out
of Germany but always returned. He was always in favor of emigration as a
solution but not even countries that claimed to be friends of Jews wanted to
accept them. When Masur interjected that it was not customary to expel people
from their homes and from a country where they had lived for generations, Himmler
argued that it was mainly the eastern Jews who created new problems and that
"Jewish masses were infested with severe epidemics." He conflated the conditions
in Germany in the 1920s with those that prevailed in the ghettoes and camps that
he himself established.
Himmler bemoaned his poor image in foreign media, and
complained that when Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were liberated it provided "mud
slinging propaganda," and that when he released 2,700 Jews to go to Switzerland
he was accused of doing it to get an alibi. "I do not need an alibi. I have
always only done what I have considered necessary for my people, this is my
belief." As for the crematoria, these were built because of epidemics in camps,
an argument that anticipated that used by Holocaust deniers.* He wished that the camps had been called "training
camps," rather than concentration camps, since the purpose was to incarcerate and
punish criminals. He wanted them to be like Theresienstadt, a community inhabited
by Jews who governed themselves. "My friend Heydrich and I wanted all the camps
to be patterned this way." He did not say that Theresienstadt was designed for
propaganda and that many of its "privileged Jews" ended up in the crematoria of
Auschwitz.
Masur finally found it difficult to contain himself. He sensed that Himmler's
self-pitying pleadings were a sign of weakness and he reminded Himmler of the
"gross misdeeds" that were perpetrated in camps. "I could not nor did I want to
control my indignation . . . it was a great satisfaction to me to tell him to his
face of some of the crimes. . . ." Masur sensed that he was now "the stronger
one" and that this enabled him to make the request that all Jews in camps which
were close to Scandinavia and Switzerland be evacuated. Supported by Kersten, he
asked for the release of all the inmates of Ravensbrück.
| Himmler was dressed in a
well-fitted uniform, decorations prominently displayed, his manner calm and
self-controlled. Masur could not believe that the man in front of him was
history's worst mass murderer. |
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Himmler conferred with his aides and returned to say that he was willing to
release 1,000 women from Ravensbrück, as long as the Jewish women were
referred to as Polish. He also agreed to release a certain number of prisoners
and hostages in other camps. The meeting lasted two and a half hours. Masur, who
had bargained for the lives of Jews with the devil incarnate, wrote proudly that
"a free Jewish man was alone with the feared and merciless Chief of Gestapo who
had the lives of five million Jews on his conscience." He characterized Himmler
as an intelligent and educated man and contrasted Hitler's "idiosyncratic" view
of Jews with Himmler's "rationalist" attitude, one that allowed him to bargain
for the release of some Jews, a policy Hitler opposed to the end. Still, Masur
found no "logic in construction, no grandeur of thought," only "lies and
evasions" in Himmler's arguments.
In the morning Masur left for Berlin, the road filled with a "stream of human
misery. . . . [T]he Germans," he wrote, "finally had a taste of what they had
inflicted on other people." He could hear the sound of bombing nearby. Now he saw
Berlin in daylight, a "field of ruins of a gigantic proportion." They went to the
Swedish legation to meet Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman who had been
involved with Kersten and Himmler in earlier releases, such as the freeing of 423
Danish Jews from Theresienstadt on April 14, but he was away. In the meantime,
many thousands of prisoners were being marched away from Ravensbrück as the
Western and Russian armies were approaching. These cruel evacuations took a
terrible toll and hundreds of women died from exhaustion or were shot to death by
the accompanying SS. Some were killed by Allied bombs and German civilians.
Schellenberg assured Masur that Red Cross transports, the white buses that would
eventually take the Ravensbrück inmates to Denmark and Sweden, were being
prepared. Masur flew back to Copenhagen, his mission completed. By the time he
got to Stockholm, he was informed that Folke Bernadotte succeeded in having the
women from Ravensbrück evacuated to Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross was
subsequently able to rescue 7,000 women, of whom about half were Jewish. Many
were physical wrecks. In Masur's opinion, "only Palestine offered these
long-suffering Jews a normal life."
"The Memoirs of Felix Kersten" (1947) fills in some gaps in Masur's overly
formal account. Kersten, a physiotherapist, who had also treated Rudolf Hess,
Robert Ley, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Count Ciano, as well as the Dutch Queen
Wilhelmina's husband, realized as he began treating Himmler for painful stomach
spasms that his "magic touch" made him indispensable. Kersten, the "Magical
Buddha," as Himmler referred to him, found the "recumbent" patient at his
weakest. "I used my power over him to save the lives of hundreds, perhaps
thousands," he recalled proudly in notes he had hidden in a brick wall. The
decorations he received after the war testified to the truthfulness of this, even
though his closeness to Nazi party leaders made him suspect in the eyes of many.
Kersten's description of Himmler as a "narrow-chested, weak-chinned man . . .
with a high-pitched shrill voice, an ingratiating smile and eyes owlishly
innocent," a copy of the Koran always at hand, a man who believed himself to be
the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler and Genghis Khan, provides us with a unique
portrait of the maniacal personality that impressed Masur with his intelligence.
Himmler, according to Kersten, accused Goebbels as the one who planned the
destruction of European Jewry, a plan that included Hitler's intention of
exterminating the Jews of Latin and North America and handing over to the Arabs
the task of exterminating Jews in their territories.
| Himmler told him: "I want
to bury the hatchet between us and the Jews. If I had my own way many things
would have been done differently." |
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According to Kersten, Himmler told him: "I
want to bury the hatchet between us and the Jews. If I had my own way many things
would have been done differently. But I have already explained to you how things
developed with us and also what the attitude was of the Jews and of the people
abroad." And he added that "the Fuehrer gave me his personal orders to follow the
harshest course." Himmler's shared confidences with Kersten included the "blue
folder" with Hitler's medical history and plans for a tomb with a hall that was
to be over 1,600 feet high and a mile in diameter, that would hold 300,000
people.* "Hitler," he said, "was in
extremely poor state of health." Kersten recorded that one of the last
conversations he had with Himmler was about a "secret weapon," more powerful than
the V-1 and V-2 rockets, that was to end the war. "One or two shots and cities
like New York or London will simply vanish from the earth." He was told of a
village built near Auschwitz where the new weapon was tried out. Twenty thousand
Jewish men, women, and children were brought to live there. A single shell
according to Himmler caused 6,000 degrees of heat and everything and everybody
there was burned to ashes. Kersten assumed that the Germans had nearly completed
constructing an atomic bomb.*
The publication of Kersten's personal papers, "The Kersten Memoirs" (1956),
with an introduction by H.R. Trevor-Roper, sheds additional light on those
momentous meetings. Trevor-Roper, while praising Kersten, downplayed the role of
Folke Bernadotte. In an essay, "The Strange Case of Himmler's Doctor Felix
Kersten and Count Bernadotte" (Commentary, April 1957), Trevor-Roper elaborated
on Folke Bernadotte's shortcomings both as a person and a diplomat. He referred
to the Himmler-Masur meeting at Gut Hartzwalde as "one of the most ironical
incidents in the whole war." From Kersten's personal papers one learns that when
Masur arrived at the Tempelhof airport he was saluted by "half a dozen smartly
turned-out men with Heil Hitler." It was surely the only time in the
history of Nazi Germany that an SS detachment saluted a Jew! According to
Kersten, Masur took off his hat and politely said: "Good evening."
Schellenberg's Account It remained for one more participant, Walter
Schellenberg in his book "The Labyrinth" (1956), to comment on the astounding
Himmler-Masur meeting. As one of Kersten's patients (Himmler insisted that all
his SS leaders undergo an examination), he said that the gifted masseur could
feel nerve complexes with his finger tips and through manipulation increase blood
circulation, thus reconditioning the entire nervous system. Schellenberg said
that he had indirect contacts with the Russians through Switzerland and Sweden
after 1942, was involved in the proposals made by Himmler to the Allies as late
as March 1944, and was negotiating with Folke Bernadotte a surrender to General
Eisenhower. All these attempts failed to break the fanatical phalanx around
Hitler. Schellenberg remembered telling Himmler that there were only two courses
open to him. He should confront Hitler and force him to resign or remove him by
force. Himmler responded that if he did that Hitler would shoot him out of hand.
Small wonder that Schellenberg's desk was built like a fortress with mounted
automatic guns that could spray his office with bullets. He also equipped himself
with an artificial tooth and a signet ring that held cyanide, poisons he never
used.
| "It was a horrifying
idea," he wrote a year after the meeting, "that I would be confronted and
negotiate with the man responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews."
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Ravensbruck
There were many hells on earth in Hitler's imperium, and Ravensbrück was
one of the worst. Hitler's only major camp for women, it was one of four prewar
camps in Germany. Of the 132,000 imprisoned there, 92,000 were cruelly murdered.
Built in May 1939 on reclaimed swampland, its barracks were constructed by the
women first sent there, a majority of them Polish. In April 1941, a men's camp
was added. Ravensbrück also included a separate camp for children. Michael
Hershon, an experienced Holocaust researcher in Australia who has studied the
Masur story, noted that the Ravensbrück complex included other
Aussenlager or subcamps, some located as far away as Mecklenburg, Bavaria,
and Bohemia-Moravia. At one point Ravensbrück had 34 such subcamps. The Nazi
system was a veritable Arbeitsamt (labor office), selling or leasing
concentration camp inmates to German industry and agriculture. In addition,
German courts consigned women there for short sentences. The inmates produced SS
uniforms and sorted such items as furs, an "enterprise" detailed in Raul
Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews" (1961). Eventually,
Ravensbrück included women from over 20 countries as the Germans sent
victims from areas threatened by Red Army advances. The camp also served as
training ground for the female SS guards of whom it had the largest contingent.
Some 3,500 of these became guards there or were sent to other camps. The sadistic
Irma Grese who mutilated women at Auschwitz had been a trainee at
Ravensbrück.
Konnilyn Feig, in her work "Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity
of Madness" (1981), wrote about the "the healthy young women who were infected
with various diseases" and on whom the camp "doctors" performed the most
disfiguring and bizarre surgical procedures. Feig's account of this barbarism is
shattering. Those that did not die became cripples, kept in a separate block as
Versuchskaninchen (guinea pigs). At Ravensbrück, Dr. Karl Gebhart
removed leg muscles from young Polish women and transplanted amputated limbs from
the victims to patients at the SS hospital. The experiments included regeneration
of bones, use of sulfanilamide for infections, operations, and sterilization.
Much of the surgery was conducted without anesthesia. The procedures made no
scientific sense. One inmate referred to them as "useless knowledge." Almost half
of the women who endured these particular experiments died. The ghastly
operations were presented before Germany's medical conventions and were written
up in Germany's medical journals.*
The final six months of the camp's existence were the worst. The commandant of
the camp stated that Himmler had ordered him in February 1944 to gas all but the
young and healthy. Germaine Tillion, a survivor of Ravensbrück, in her book
"Ravensbrüc"k (1975), suggests that Himmler only wanted to save
enough women to trade for his peace proposals two months later. As Russian troops
approached, more and more victims were brought in from other camps and room was
made in the already overcrowded barracks by gassing and cremation. The roads
between Auschwitz and Ravensbrück were littered with bodies of those who
died on "death marches." Among the many who transited through the camp were
prominent inmates such as Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of New York Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia; Genevieve de Gaulle, niece of French General Charles De
Gaulle; Rosa Thaelmann, wife of Ernest Thaelmann, chief of the Communist Party in
Germany (whom the Nazis executed in Buchenwald); Franz Kafka's love, the writer
Milena Jesenska; and the poetess Charlotte Delbo. These were "protected"
prisoners, held as hostages. As for the other inmates, Tillion related that even
as Himmler held discussions with Folke Bernadotte and Kersten, the crematoria at
the camp did not cease consuming their victims. The torturers, she noted, were
ordinary people: dentists, a former printer, doctors, nurses, middle-level
workers — without criminal records. Yet these men and women "drowned infants
in pails, poisoned the soup given to the sick, and planted gangrene in the wounds
they had opened in the legs of school children."
| The torturers were
ordinary people: dentists, a former printer, doctors, nurses, middle-level
workers, without criminal records. |
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Fifty-eight years ago this past April, dozens of buses painted white and
bearing the emblems of Sweden and the Red Cross left the hell of Ravensbrück
for Denmark and eventually Sweden, carrying with them thousands of women of
different nationalities. The buses included many Jewish survivors. Eventually,
some 13,500 women were released from Ravensbrück, of whom 3,000 were Jewish.
In fact, the Swedish white buses left thousands behind. When the Russian troops
entered Ravensbrück on April 30, the day that Hitler committed suicide,
there were still 23,000 Jewish and non-Jewish women and children in
Ravensbrück. Now, almost six decades after the women of Ravensbrück
were transported to freedom, we can finally "hear" the victims speak. Lund
University in Sweden has been the repository of hundreds of oral testimonies
recorded as soon as the Ravensbrück victims arrived. In what can only be
characterized as a heartless exercise of bureaucratic caprice, the entire
manuscript collection deposited at Lund was closed to the public until 1995.
These testimonies are slowly being translated into English and are only now being
made available to the public on the University of Lund website. For reasons that
make little sense, the brave women are not identified by a name but by a number
— a terrible reminder of their earlier anonymity.
Recovered Testimony Testimony #111 is from a Jewish woman from the
town of Tarnow, 25 years old at the time of liberation, a dressmaker by
profession, who was first imprisoned in the town's ghetto. In eleven pages she
recounted the conditions under which she lived through deportations and
punishments. She came to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. An orchestra was
playing as she stood naked at "selections" and saw children going directly to gas
chambers. She suffered a beating for having a fever and worked in a laundry
washing out the bloodied clothes of those who died. As the Russians approached,
she and several hundred women walked 30 kilometers daily and then traveled in
open coal cars until they arrived at Ravensbrück where she heard the
overseers shout at them "Schmutzstucke!" (dirty things), the insult hurled
at those at a fatal stage of starvation, women about to be sent to the gas
chamber. "One beautiful day," as she put it, the order came for all Jewish women
to leave camp, and from there they went by bus and boat, "led like children,"
until they arrived in Sweden on May 1, 1945. She had lost her entire family.
Another testimony is that of a Jewish woman, #242. At 19, she
was held as a political prisoner in Majdanek and Auschwitz. In the pages of her
testimony she told of wandering around the countryside before deportation with
her brother's 9-year-old son, using her diminishing funds to find a place to
sleep, and later hiding in Warsaw, always in danger of the szmalcownicy
(blackmailers). After hair-raising escapes she was denounced to the Gestapo by
the wife of her former teacher. The child was shot and she was sent to Majdanek
death camp, where 20,000 Jews had been killed with grenades as a camp orchestra
played.* She was transferred to Ravensbrück in November
1944, as the Allied armies advanced.
Throughout recorded history prisoners were able to communicate with their
loved ones, and even those condemned to death made statements and penned letters.
The Holocaust destroyed lives and memories. The hermetically sealed ghettos and
death camps denied the innocent what the most guilty had been granted. For more
than half a century we have not been able to hear the "voices" of the women freed
from the hell of Ravensbrück. As more and more testimonies finally become
available on the Lund website we may learn the names of #111 and #242 and of the
many others so we can honor them and in that way pay homage — even so late
— to the many nameless ones whose lives and deaths should never be
forgotten.
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| * | The author is grateful to Andrzej Kobos of Lund, Sweden, for
obtaining for him a copy of the Masur booklet and to Christina Gravdahl for
translating it. |
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| * | The bodies of the sick were ostensibly burnt in the crematoria
in order to prevent the spread of typhus or other infectious diseases. No
responsible historian has accepted the Nazi account on this
matter. |
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| * | Kersten has been proven to be a very reliable recorder of
information, and likely reports correctly here as
well. |
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| * | Himmler's startling revelations are
unconfirmed. |
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| * | See Benno Mueller-Hill, "The Blood from Auschwitz and the
Silence of the Scholars" in "History and Philosophy of Life Sciences 21," pp.
331–365 (1999). |
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| * | To quote #242: "The Jews were taken out in groups to the sixth
field, the 'death field' at Majdanek. As an orchestra played, twenty thousand
Jews were killed, with grenades. First they were told to undress. The action was
carried out over the course of one day." From Voices from Ravensbrück,
Interview No. 242, March 20, 1946. |
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