- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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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