Man in the Way

(See Cover]

People in the United Nations believed that victory in Europe was possible in 1943, probable in 1944, certain no later than 1945. They were asking how Germany could hope to win; why Germany did not see the ineluctable defeat, sue now or soon for peace.

Germany's Hope. Prime Minister Winston Churchill answered them last week, in a speech to a national conference of women, in London: ". . . And the enemy. What is their hope? Their hope is that we will weary; their hope is that the democracies will faint later on the long road; that now, in the fifth year of the war, there will be doubts, despondencies and slackness. They then hope that out of this they will be able to consolidate their forces in their central fortress of Europe, their remote home islands in Japan, and extract from our weariness and from any divisions which might appear among us the means of making terms to enable them to repair their losses, regather their forces and open upon the world, perhaps within another decade, a war even more terrible than that through which we are now passing. . . ."

Even more precisely, it can be said that Germany hopes: 1) to split the United Nations and to come to separate peace either with Britain-U.S. in the west or with Soviet Russia in the east; 2) to get a conditional peace that will leave Germany strong, independent, defensible--a world power to be treated with deference by the other world powers.

On this aim, big & little Germans seemed wholly agreed. The big--and therefore effective--Germans divided into two leading groups on how it can be achieved:

The Army Leaders, supported by most industrialists, Catholics and anti-Nazis on the home front and in the Army, know that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are solidly on record against any peace with the Nazi regime. Russia, in its sponsorship of the National Committee of Free Germany and the German Officers' Union (TIME, Oct. 4), seems willing to make conditional peace with any Wehrmacht generals' regime that kicks out the top Nazis. To many a Wehrmacht general the Russian offer makes sense.* But it can be accepted only by an Army revolt. Hitler's strongest man in the way of such an anti-Nazi Putsch is Heinrich Himmler --supreme boss of the German home front; commander of 600,000 splendidly trained and well-armed SS youths, supersaturated with Naziism, mostly stationed on the home front.

The Nazi Leaders, those indelibly stamped with the Party label--like Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and thousands of Nazis who hold cardinal state positions--these Germans know that perpetuation of the Nazi regime is, above all, a personal matter of life or death. They hope to consolidate their forces and successfully defend the Third Reich. They also hope, and they probably believe, that the Allies may weary, divide and make peace with a Nazi Germany.

Political Base. In the rush of war, people in the United Nations were apt to lose sight of the internal politics of Germany. But Germany is not only a military force to be crushed. Germany had a political dynamic--an explosive mixture of Naziism and the national will for a war of revenge and expansion that permeated all classes.

The Nazification of Germany was nearly complete twelve years ago. Naziism's rank & file--the street fighters, civil servants, savants, Jew-baiters, Red-haters, Fuehrer-supporters--these had swirled up out of the demoralized, frustrated lower middle class. Mucked about by the last war, by inflations and depressions, worried neurotic by unemployment, pressed between big business and the trade unions--these were the ones who turned to Hitler and the Nazi Party for economic salvation, for personal advancement, for resurrection of their Fatherland.

But the importance of Naziism in the '30s, and today, is not only the millions of mice marching to the pipings of a demagogue. Naziism was in tune with Deutschland Ueber Alles--with the German superrace strains of Hegel, Nietzsche and Fichte; with the thunder of Wagner; with the rhythmic plans of the German General Staff first to dominate Europe and then the world; with the rondo movement of German Junkers and industrialists to seize world markets. Naziism was nourished and adopted by Army men like embittered, ever-dreaming General Erich Ludendorff, industrialists like Fritz Thyssen and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, businessmen like Helmuth Wohlthat, Junkers like Franz von Papen.

In the Weimar Republic's last free election, in November 1932, Hitler's Nazis got some 2,000,000 less votes than in the previous July election, and 68% of those Germans who went to the polls voted for the Nationalist, Catholic, Social Democratic and Communist Parties. The Nazi exchequer was empty and Hitler told Goebbels he was thinking of suicide. It was then that powerful, anti-democratic Germans holding the strings of statecraft decided to jerk Hitler up into power.

In Hitler's state, Army, Junkers and Business got most of what they wanted. They were not concerned with the public trappings of political power, and most Government posts went to the middle-class Nazi rank-&-filers. It was out of that twisted class of beaten nobodies that Heinrich Himmler had come: his life and struggles show where Nazis come from and where they can come from again. And in the fifth year of World War II, his life had more than sociological importance: he had clawed his way up beside Hitler atop the Nazi muckpile. He is, with Hitler, the German with the power to hold back any peace at the expense of the Nazis.

Beginnings. Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich in 1900, the son of a Catholic schoolteacher. At 15, Heinrich orated with high-pitched spirit against Social Democrats and Communists, and the schoolmaster of his Gymnasium told him: "You should be a Government Minister." His father told him that he was a potential criminal.

Himmler paraded through World War I and stayed sufficiently far from the bullets and mud. After the war he began to make his mark in Munich beer halls. He was not exactly a pimp. But he had addresses to give fat-necked provincial gentlemen on the prowl in Bavaria's capital.

In one of these beer halls, Himmler first heard Hitler. At once, he joined the party of the flaccid man with the frenetic shriek and the square-cut mustache. He carried the standard in the abortive Nazi beer-cellar Putsch of 1923. Himmler was not arrested; the Bavarian police of the Weimar Republic told him to run along and find nicer playmates.

Toward Power. Himmler's zeal caught the eye of Nazi leaders. Gregor Strasser, then an important Hitler lieutenant, called Himmler to Munich to serve as his secretary. Kurt Ludecke, in I Knew Hitler, quotes Strasser: "[Himmler] sees in every creature who doesn't 'think' Nazi a Jew or a Jew serf, a Jesuit or a Free-Mason. He's very ambitious, but I won't take him along--he's no world beater." Nine years later, Himmler had Strasser shot.

Power. By 1936 Himmler had control of the entire German police system. Goering, who had been in command of the Prussian State Police, became boss of Germany's Four Year Plan and devoted most of his time to the growing Air Force. Captain Ernest Roehm, who had been in command of the SA (Naziism's brown-shirted street fighters), was shot during Hitler's and Himmler's 1934 blood purge of radical Nazis (meaning those who subscribed to the Socialism in National Socialism).

Himmler has almost never been seen in civilian clothes ; he prefers SS uniforms. A U.S. reporter who saw him during one of his few appearances in mufti says: "He looked like a professor of agriculture in a Midwest University." He has brief, skinny hair. His pince-nez rimless glasses give his somber blue eyes the precise squint of the clerk of a small-town council who secretly believes he will some day be mayor. He shaves twice daily yet never seems clean-shaven. His jowls flab down to a murderous little chin; the mustache is a respectful miniature of Hitler's. When Hitler's mouth is not in use, it says bah; Himmler's says all right, you asked for it.

Like Hitler, Himmler is an undeviating vegetarian. He adores U.S. breakfast cereals, drinks herb tea instead of coffee, occasionally sips a glass of light wine. Unlike Hitler, he occasionally smokes cigars. Himmler shares Hitler's interest in what they call art and wants his whole SS to be art-conscious and to have good Nordic taste.

By a judicious combination of blackmail, privilege and loot, Himmler has gathered a fortune. By 1940 he had invested no less than $2,200,000 in South American countries, the Syrian carpet trade, Finland's pulp industry, life-insurance policies.

In War. As head of the German A.R.P., Himmler must maintain law & order through hell and high bombing. As Gestapo Chief, Himmler's authority has expanded over a territory eight times the size of the original Germany he was charged with policing in 1936. As policemen of Nazi Europe, Himmler and his trained Gestapo animals have organized a program of extermination without parallel.

For this calculated mass murder, Himmler has two motives: 1) he knows that the dead do not revolt; 2) he believes that if non-German nations in Europe are sufficiently depopulated, they will be too weak in the future to block German expansion and German domination. About 10,000,000 European civilians have been killed, including an estimated 5,000,000 in Russia, 3,200,000 in Poland, 800,000 in Yugoslavia. And by Himmler's command, other millions of Europeans have been uprooted, confined and starved, forced into labor for Germany.

The Blackshirts. In his SS, Himmler has 600,000 troops and about 20 air squadrons, magnificently equipped, passionately devoted to him and their mission. A few of these divisions have been used as shock troops by Wehrmacht generals who despise and fear the SS. Some have been almost entirely wiped out.

But Himmler has managed to keep most of his SS divisions on the home front. In all cities the SS occupies strategic buildings. They have been fortified and stocked with ample supplies of arms, munitions and food. If the Blackshirts should be called by Himmler to suppress a people's rebellion, or an Army Putsch, they would gladly give their lives in fulfillment of their beloved "Nibelungenlied," which ends by the glorification of final destruction.

To guard the home front with the trusted SS had become something more than a foresighted precaution. As the fifth winter of war began to fasten down on Europe, Germany was in chronic retreat. The Allies had invaded Europe and Mussolini had fallen. Close to four million Germans had been lost in the war,

Germany's economy already was squeezed and strained. The British Ministry of Economic Warfare estimates that total German industrial production was down 20% since 1942; that no attempt has been made to repair the damage done to a large number of high-priority targets in Germany by the Allied aerial pounding. German stocks & bonds, even on the regimented market, were in acute decline. Food was just sufficient to prolong life and sustain work; the clothing ration for civilians was completely suspended on Aug. 1; the coal ration this year will be 70% of the 1941 allowance--and in that winter city-dwellers wore overcoats in their homes and there was hot water just one day each week. It was in these circumstances that Hitler, on Aug. 25, appointed Heinrich Himmler Minister of the Interior, with full powers over the home front. Soon trials and executions of "defeatists" began. Himmler had to warn Party members that they would henceforth wear their Party badges or go to concentration camps. A Gestapo "observer" was assigned to every German regiment.

The Dilemma. Germany approached an ultimate crisis. As serpents encircled the classic victims of Laocooen (see cut, p. 25), so was Germany now enmeshed in all the currents and consequences of Naziism.

Would Germany fall with its Nazis? Or, through the Army, find survival without them? In great part, the answer must be made in the end by Great Britain, the U.S.--and Soviet Russia. But the Nazis still own Germany. Last week Paul Joseph Goebbels, who two years ago was Adolf Hitler's mainstay at home, piped a cry to all Germans:

"If here or there there is a cowardly individual among us who might put a comfortable life above the honor and the future of our people, and who might through treason and infidelity . . . stab the fighting front in the back, we are determined . . . to cut off his head."

Propagandist Goebbels' words had long since failed. When heads fall, it will not be Goebbels who cuts them off. Until his own head falls, it will be Heinrich Himmler who swings the ax.

* The famous Commander of the German Reichswehr General Hans von Seeckt, shortly before Hitler came to power, wrote an article in the Muenchner Neueste Nachrichten advocating friendship and close cooperation between Germany and Russia.

* In Greek mythology Laocooen had profaned the temple of Apollo and he and his two sons were destroyed by serpents while preparing to sacrifice a bull.

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