A Jew Talks to Himmler

Frank Fox

      Frank Fox came to the U.S. from his native Poland in 1937. During the war he served in military government in France and Germany. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of Delaware and taught at Temple University and West Chester University. Among many writings, he is the author of God’s Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest Massacre.

      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 Ravensbruck. The godfather for that extraordinary meeting was Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur whose “magical hands” had been indispensable to Himmler since 1939.

      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 recent work, The Devil’s Doctor: Felix Kersten and the Secret Plot to Turn Himmler (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 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 Shakesperean dramas

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      The meeting between Himmler and Masur took place at Gut Hartzwalde, Kersten’s estate, not far from the Ravensbruck camp where starving and mutilated women were unaware that Himmler and Masur were meeting to decide their fate. Originally Hillel Storch of the Swedish Jewish World Congress Branch was to meet with Himmler, but Masur was chosen instead. According to Joseph Kessel in Les Mains de Miracle, “The Miraculous Hands” (Gallimard, 1960), Storch feared for his life. He had already lost seventeen 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 a safe symbol, as they flew to Berlin through skies crossed regularly by Allied planes on their bombing missions. Kersten referred to his companion, the visa-less 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,” (Stockholm, 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 the roofless Berlin, Masur witnessed the destruction that became more visible as they drove from the Tempelhof airport through the city. Kersten’s estate was some thirty miles north of Berlin, almost halfway to the hell of Ravensbruck. 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.

      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 was enraged the previous fall when Himmler agreed to send 2,700 concentration camp survivors to Switzerland. 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-sirens sounded. At the stroke of 2:30 Himmler arrived, followed with 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 fourteen 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 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 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 Ravensbruck.

      Himmler conferred with his aides and returned to say that he was willing to release 1,000 women from Ravensbruck, 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. 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 . . . the 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 423 Danish Jews from Theresienstadt on April 14, but he was away. In the meantime, many thousands of prisoners were being marched away from Ravensbruck 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 Ravensbruck 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 to have the women from Ravensbruck 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.”

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      The Memoirs of Felix Kersten (New York, 1947) fill in some gaps in Masur’s overly formal account. Kersten, a physiotherapist, who had also treated Rudolf Hess, Robert Ley, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and 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 Ghenghiz Khan, provides us with unique portrait of the maniacal personality that impressed Masur with his intelligence. Himmler, according to Kersten, accused Goebbels as one who wished the destruction of European Jewry, a plan that included Hitler’s intention to exterminate the Jews of Latin and North America and handing over to the Arabs the task of exterminating Jews in their territories.

      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 (syphilis, progressive paralysis, orgasmic speech-making) and plans for a tomb with a hall that was to be 355 meters high, 1,500 meters 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 ten years later, The Kersten Memoirs, (London, 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.”

      It remained for one more participant, Walter Schellenberg, in his book The Labyrinth (New York, 1956) to comment on the astounding Himmler-Masur meeting. As one of Kersten patients (Himmler insisted that all his SS leaders undergo an examination), he said that the gifted masseur could feel nerve complexes with his fingertips 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.

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      There were many hells on earth in Hitler’s imperium, and Ravensbruck 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 swamp land, its barracks were constructed by the women first sent there, the majority of them Polish. In April 1941, a men’s camp was added. Ravensbruck also included a separate camp for children. Michael Hershon, an experienced Holocaust researcher in Australia who has studied the Masur story, noted that Ravensbruck complex included other Aussenlager or sub-camps, some located as far away as Mecklenburg, Bavaria and Bohemia-Moravia. At one point Ravensbruck was connected with thirty-four such sub-camps. 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 (Chicago, 1961). Eventually, Ravensbruck included women from over twenty countries as the Germans sent victims from areas threatened by the 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 Ravensbruck.

      Konnilyn Feig, in her work: Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness (New York, 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 Ravensbruck, 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 Ravensbruck, in her book Ravensbruck, (New York, 1975), suggests that Himmler only wanted to save enough women as a 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 Ravesnbruck 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 LaGuardia Gluck, New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s sister, Genevieve de Gaulle, De Gaulle’s niece, 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.”

      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 Ravensbruck 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 Ravensbruck, of whom 3,000 were Jewish. In fact, the Swedish white buses left thousands behind. When the Russian troops entered Ravensbruck on April 30, the day that Hitler committed suicide, there were still 23,000 Jewish and non-Jewish women and children in Ravensbruck. Now, almost six decades after the women of Ravensbruck 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 Ravensbruck victims arrived. In what can only be characterized as a heartless exercise of bureaucratic and arbitrary rulings, 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 names of brave women are not identified by a name but by a number—a terrible reminder of their earlier anonymity.

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      Testimony number # 111 is from a Jewish woman from the town of Tarnow, twenty-five 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 Ravensbruck 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 her family.

      Another testimony is that of a Jewish woman # 242. At nineteen, she was held as a political prisoner in Majdanek and Auschwitz. In the eleven pages of her testimony she told of wandering around the countryside before deportation with a nine-year-old son of her brother’s, using her diminishing funds to find a place to sleep, and later hiding with Aryan papers in Warsaw, always in danger of the szmalcownicy, “blackmailers.” After hair-raising escapes she was denounced to the Gestapo by her former teacher. The child was shot and she was sent to Majdanek death camp where twenty-thousand Jews were killed with machine guns and grenades as a camp orchestra played. As the Allied armies advanced, she was transferred to Ravensbruck in November, 1944.

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      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 Ravensbruck. As more and more testimonies become finally 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 late homage to so many nameless ones whose lives and deaths should never be forgotten.     Ω

      The author is grateful to Andrzej Kobos of Lund, Sweden, for obtaining for him a copy of the Masur book and to Christina Gravdahl for translating it.