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Himmler's Great Betrayal -
Churchill Rejected Peace
Overtures In 1944
By Ian Kershaw
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/01/07/stirevnws03007.html

1-7-01



On August 31, 1944, the head of MI6 forwarded to the prime minister, Winston Churchill, an intercepted coded signal. It was a telegram from the Reichsführer-SS and chief of German police, Heinrich Himmler. The telegram has not survived. But it must have been highly sensitive - in a handwritten reply to the head of MI6, Churchill noted: "Himmler telegram kept and destroyed by me."
 
Out of some 14,000 decrypts that the British prime minister personally saw, this was the only one he destroyed. And it was the only signal emanating from Himmler.
 
This tantalising piece of information has been discovered by the research team working on a new documentary on Himmler and his betrayal of Hitler. The story of the betrayal is, in its full extent, largely unknown, but this new evidence suggests that his secret dealings with the allies went much further than is commonly assumed.
 
Himmler had constructed his own path to power, and built the SS, the organisation he headed, upon unquestioned personal loyalty to the Führer. As the motto of the SS, he had chosen the words: "My honour is loyalty". But it now seems "the loyal Heinrich" (as Himmler was dubbed) was more prepared than any other Nazi leader to engage in mounting betrayal of his leader during the last eight months of the Third Reich.
 
We can only speculate on the content of the telegram. However, it is plausible to assume it was sent by Himmler to an intermediary who was putting out tentative peace feelers to the British on Himmler's behalf. Churchill, adamantly opposed to any negotations with the Germans, must have been anxious to head off rumours of a German peace with Britain, as it could jeopardise the vital alliance with the Soviet Union. By destroying the telegram, he was ensuring that the feelers were not pursued and all traces were erased.
 
This interpretation is hardened by circumstantial evidence. In August 1944 the Japanese had hinted that they were prepared to try to broker a separate peace between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Japanese ambassador in Berlin put the suggestion directly to Hitler at a meeting early in September. Hitler rejected the idea out of hand.
 
Himmler was not taken with the notion of overtures to Stalin, but was enough of a realist to see that Germany could not win the war. On September 12 he, too, met Hitler to discuss peace feelers to Russia or - his plain preference - to Britain. Clearly, he met the same response. Hitler was not interested.
 
Negotiations, he had always asserted, could be carried out only from a position of strength. He was now planning a last Canute-like attempt to turn the tide of war: an offensive through the Ardennes to throw the British and Americans "back into the Atlantic", then, with new weapons at his disposal, to attack the Russians.
 
Himmler realised that discussing possible peace feelers with Hitler was a lost cause. It was the beginning of the parting of the ways between the two men.
 
By the autumn of 1944, the allies were closing in on the Reich's borders to east and west. The end was plainly looming. Unlike Hitler, Himmler was not prepared to go under. On the contrary, he thought of saving his own neck, of life after Hitler, and of leading a post-Hitlerian Reich in the continued fight against Bolshevism. For these ends, he needed a negotiated settlement with the West, and as the August telegram suggests, he was already well on the way to finding an independent path out.
 
But Hitler still wielded mighty power, so Himmler had to tread with extreme caution. For months he played a double game - openly the "loyal Heinrich", secretly the increasingly desperate seeker of a way to avoid being sucked down in Hitler's self-destruction.
 
With the failure of the Ardennes offensive in December 1944, Hitler's illusion of victory evaporated. What was left was to fight on to the end. "We'll not capitulate. Never," Hitler stated. "We can go down. But we'll take a world with us."
 
This self-destructive urge had no resonance with Himmler. By December 1944 a liaison officer under the command of Walter Schellenberg, the head of the SS intelligence service, now confirms that he had learnt from his chief that Himmler was trying to arrange a separate peace deal.
 
An obvious problem with any deal was Himmler's reputation. To gain credibility with the West, he now tried to show himself in the best possible light. In January 1945, through a Swiss intermediary acting for rabbis in America and Canada, he agreed to the release of 1,400 Jews a month from Theresienstadt in return for $250,000. No money, in fact, changed hands when 1,200 Jews were released in February. But Himmler stipulated that the press in America and Switzerland should report his "humanitarian" gesture.. It was correctly deduced in Washington that he was seeking contact.
 
But when Hitler learnt of the release of the Jews he was reputedly furious and banned any further releases. By now, Himmler's star was on the wane. He had been given a senior military command in January 1945 and had proved a disaster, withdrawing for much of the time on alleged grounds of illness to an SS hospital north of Berlin. But he continued scheming to engineer his own survival.
 
In one of the most bizarre incidents, he attempted to improve his standing with the western allies by agreeing to a secret rendezvous with a representative of the World Jewish Congress. There he conceded the release of female Jews from Ravensbrück, in direct contravention of Hitler's ban. Between February and April 1945 he had secret meetings with Count Folke Bernadotte, the vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, which eventually moved to the possibility of a German surrender in the west.
 
On April 22, in an outburst of hysterical fury, Hitler openly acknowledged that the war was lost and expressed his wish to die in the Reich capital. It eased any sense of betrayal when Himmler met Bernadotte the next evening and asked him to transmit an offer of surrender to the western allies.
 
On April 28 Hitler was given the news, broadcast by the BBC, that Himmler had proposed unconditional surrender to Britain and America. He exploded at this "most shameful betrayal in human history". Himmler was stripped of all his offices and despised beyond measure by the man he had for so long revered. For Hitler this, of all the treachery he saw surrounding him, was the worst. He began preparations to take his own life. Within two days, he was dead.
 
Admiral Dönitz inherited for a few days the shreds of power in the Third Reich. He needed no persuasion that Himmler could only be a liability, and rejected his overtures for inclusion in his short-lived cabinet. Himmler, his dreams of continued power shattered, shaved off his moustache, adorned himself with a black eye-patch, put on the uniform of a military police sergeant, and went on the run for a fortnight. After falling into British hands, he killed himself on May 23, 1945, by crushing a cyanide capsule contained in a cavity in his teeth.
 
Ian Kershaw is professor of modern history at Sheffield University. Timewatch: Himmler, Hitler and the End of the Reich will be screened on BBC2 on January 19 at 9pm



 
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