Very Dear Doktor Aue!
I read your memorandum with keen interest. I’m happy to know that you are recovering and that you are devoting your convalescence to useful research; I didn’t know you were interested in these questions, so vital for the future of our race. I wonder if Germany, even after the war, will be ready to accept such profound and necessary ideas. A lot of work still has to be done on ways of thinking. Whatever the case, when you’re all better, I’ll be happy to discuss these projects and this visionary author with you in more detail.
Heil Hitler!
Yours,
Heinrich Himmler
Flattered, I waited for Thomas to visit me to show him this letter, as well as my memorandum; but to my surprise, he reacted angrily to it: “You really think this is the right time for such childishness?” He seemed to have lost all his sense of humor; when he started to describe the latest arrests to me, I began to understand why. Even in my own circle some men were implicated: two of my university friends and my former professor in Kiel, Jessen, who had apparently grown closer to Goerdeler in recent years. “We also found evidence against Nebe, but he’s disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Well, if anyone knows how to do that, it’s he. He must have been a little twisted: at his place, there was a movie of a gassing in the East, can you imagine him putting that on at night?” I had rarely seen Thomas so nervous. I made him drink, offered him cigarettes, but he didn’t let much drop; I was just able to divine that Schellenberg had had contact with certain opposition circles, before the attempt. At the same time, Thomas ranted angrily against the conspirators: “Killing the Führer! How could they think that would be a solution? That he be removed from command of the Wehrmacht, all right, he’s ill anyway. One could even have imagined, I don’t know, forcing him into retirement, if it was really necessary, letting him remain President but handing over power to the Reichsführer…According to Schellenberg, the British would agree to negotiate with the Reichsführer. But killing the Führer? It’s insane, they didn’t realize…They swore an oath to him, then they try to kill him!” It seemed really to bother him; as for me, the very idea that Schellenberg or the Reichsführer had thought of putting the Führer aside shocked me. I didn’t see much difference between that or killing him, but I didn’t say so to Thomas; he was already too depressed.
Ohlendorf, whom I saw toward the end of the month, when I finally began to go out again, seemed to think as I did. I found him—he who had already been so glum to begin with—even more despondent than Thomas. He confessed to me that the night before the execution of Jessen, to whom he had remained close in spite of everything, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. “I kept thinking about his wife and children. I’ll try to help them, I’m going to give them part of my salary.” He still thought, though, that Jessen deserved the death sentence. For years, he explained to me, our professor had broken his ties to National Socialism. They had continued to see each other, to talk, and Jessen had even tried to recruit his former student. Ohlendorf agreed with him on a number of points: “It’s obvious—the widespread corruption within the Party, the erosion of the rule of law, the pluralist anarchy that’s replaced the Führerstaat, all that’s unacceptable. And the measures against the Jews, the Endlösung, were a mistake. But overthrowing the Führer and the NSDAP, that’s unthinkable. We have to purge the Party, bring up the veterans of the front, who have a realistic vision of things, the leaders of the Hitlerjugend, maybe the only idealists we have left. It’s those young people who will have to spur the Party on after the war. But we can’t dream of going backward, to the middle-class conservatism of the career soldiers and the Prussian aristocrats. This deed discredits them forever. What’s more, the people understand this.” It was true: all the SD reports showed that ordinary people and soldiers, despite their concerns, their fatigue, their anxieties, their demoralization, even their defeatism, were scandalized by the conspirators’ treason. The war effort and the campaign for austerity had received a jolt of energy; Goebbels, finally authorized to truly declare the “total war” he held so dear, went to great lengths to whip it up, without it really being necessary. The situation, though, was only getting worse: the Russians had retaken Galicia and gone beyond their 1939 border, Lublin was falling, and the wave had finally died down on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the Bolshevik command was obviously just waiting for us to crush for them the Polish insurrection, launched at the beginning of the month. “We’re playing Stalin’s game there,” Ohlendorf commented. “It would be better to explain to the AK that the Bolsheviks represent a much greater danger than we do. If the Poles fought at our side, we could still hold the Russians back. But the Führer doesn’t want to hear about it. And the Balkans are going to fall like a house of cards.” In Bessarabia, in fact, the Sixth Army, reconstituted from scratch under Fretter-Pico, was getting itself cut into pieces a second time around: the gates to Romania gaped wide open. France was obviously lost; after having opened another front in Provence and taken Paris, the Anglo-Americans were getting ready to clear the rest of the country, while our bruised troops ebbed back to the Rhine. Ohlendorf was very pessimistic: “The new rockets are almost ready, according to Kammler. He’s convinced they will change the course of the war. But I don’t see how. A rocket carries fewer explosives than an American B-17, and can be used only once.” Unlike Schellenberg, about whom he refused to speak, he didn’t have any plans or concrete solutions: he could only talk about a “final National Socialist leap forward, a giant surge,” which to me resembled Goebbels’s rhetoric a little too much. I had the impression that he was secretly resigned to defeat. But I don’t think he had yet admitted that to himself.
The events of July 20 had another consequence—minor, but unfortunate for me: in mid-August, the Gestapo arrested Judge Baumann, of the Berlin SS court. I learned of it fairly rapidly from Thomas, but didn’t immediately realize all the consequences. At the beginning of September, I was summoned by Brandt, who was accompanying the Reichsführer on an inspection in Schleswig-Holstein. I joined the special train near Lübeck. Brandt began by announcing that the Reichsführer wanted to confer the first-class distinction on my War Service Cross: “Whatever you may have thought of it, your action in Hungary was very positive. The Reichsführer is pleased with it. He was also favorably impressed by your recent initiative.” Then he informed me that the Kripo had asked Baumann’s replacement to reopen the case against me; the latter had written to the Reichsführer: in his opinion, the accusations deserved an investigation. “The Reichsführer hasn’t changed his mind, and you have all his confidence. But he thinks it would be detrimental to you to prevent an investigation again. Rumors are beginning to circulate, you must know that. The best thing would be for you to defend yourself and prove your innocence: that way, we can close the case once and for all.” I didn’t like this idea at all, I was beginning to know the manic stubbornness of Clemens and Weser too well, but I didn’t have a choice. Back in Berlin, I went on my own initiative to introduce myself to Judge von Rabingen, a fanatical National Socialist, and explained my version of the facts to him. He retorted that the case put together by the Kripo contained disturbing elements, he kept going back to the bloodstained German clothes, made to my size, and he was also intrigued by the business with the twins, which he wanted to clear up at all costs. The Kripo had finally questioned my sister, who was back in Pomerania: she had placed the twins in a private institution, in Switzerland; she affirmed they were our orphaned second cousins, born in France, whose birth certificates had disappeared in the French rout in 1940. “That could be true,” von Rabingen superciliously declared. “But for now it’s unverifiable.”