The death of Himmler

Late in the evening of 23 May 1945, in a villa on Uelzener Straße in Lüneburg occupied by the intelligence staff of the British Second Army, an army doctor began to examine a prisoner who had been identified a few hours earlier as Heinrich Himmler. When he told him to open his mouth, the prisoner jerked his head away and bit through a capsule of potassium cyanide hidden in his mouth. Despite attempts to save him, he died some fifteen minutes later, at about 11.15 p.m. The man who had led the SS since 1929 and the whole German police since 1936, and who bore responsibility like few others for the Holocaust and for crimes against millions of people in occupied Europe, thus escaped trial and sentence.

Two days earlier, on 21 May, Himmler had been detained with two companions at a checkpoint near Bremervörde in Lower Saxony. No one recognised him at the time: he carried papers in the name of Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger, had shaved off his moustache and wore a black patch over one eye. It was only on 23 May, in a British interrogation camp, that he himself revealed who he was.

The fall of the most loyal

As late as April 1945 Himmler regarded himself as a man with whom the Western Allies would have to negotiate. Behind Hitler’s back he held talks with the Swedes, and on the night of 23/24 April at Lübeck he passed on through Count Folke Bernadotte an offer to surrender to the Americans and the British. Truman and Churchill rejected it, and when Western news agencies reported the talks on 28 April, Hitler, who had called Himmler “der treue Heinrich” (faithful Heinrich), regarded it as treason: he ordered his arrest, and in his political testament expelled him from the party and from all his offices.

Himmler refused to accept this. With his staff and escort – some 150 people according to German studies – he went north to the headquarters of the new Reich President, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, hoping for a high post in the new government. For several days he took part in discussions, but on 6 May Dönitz dismissed him from all his functions. None of the Allies had any intention of talking to the head of the SS; Dönitz understood that his presence would discredit any German authority.

Sergeant Hitzinger

Himmler did not prepare his escape carefully. When, after the surrender of 8 May, he no longer had any illusions of being allowed back into the game, he left the Flensburg area around 11 May with a small group of companions – among them his adjutant Werner Grothmann and Heinz Macher, an officer of his escort. They first went south to Friedrichskoog on the North Sea, then crossed the Elbe to the area of Neuhaus at the mouth of the Oste. There the group split up, and Himmler went on foot with two men, probably without any clear destination. According to Himmler’s biographer Peter Longerich, all he had with him was a forged pay book and a discharge certificate in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger, a sergeant of the Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei).

According to most accounts, the choice of this cover proved fatal. The Secret Field Police was one of the formations whose members were subject to automatic arrest in the British zone, and the stamp on Hitzinger’s papers was already known to British intelligence from the documents of fleeing SS men. On the evening of 21 May Himmler and his two companions were detained while trying to pass through a checkpoint between Bremervörde and Meinstedt. Accounts differ as to who was manning it: according to Longerich and the literature based on him, the checkpoint was manned by liberated Soviet prisoners of war operating under British supervision; other studies speak of a British patrol. What is certain is that the detainees ended up in British hands as suspected members of a formation subject to arrest.

Over the next two days they were moved through several transit camps until, on 23 May, they arrived at Interrogation Centre No. 031 near Lüneburg, located at Barnstedt. In the afternoon Himmler asked to speak to the commandant. When Captain Thomas Selvester received him in his office, he took off his eye patch, put on his glasses and declared that he was Heinrich Himmler.

The night in Lüneburg

Selvester had the prisoner searched. A brass case containing a cyanide phial was found in his clothing; it was suspected that he might have a second one. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters was informed of the arrest. In the evening his chief of intelligence, Colonel Michael Murphy, arrived and ordered Himmler to be taken to Lüneburg, to the building occupied by Second Army intelligence. There the prisoner was to be stripped and thoroughly examined.

The examination was carried out by an army doctor, Captain C. J. L. Wells. When he looked into Himmler’s mouth and saw a small dark object in a gap by his teeth, the prisoner jerked his head, clenched his jaws and bit through the phial hidden there. The British tried to save him – they held him upside down, tried to get out the remains of the poison and gave him emetics – but the cyanide acted too quickly. According to witnesses, including Sergeant Major Edwin Austin, Himmler died after about a quarter of an hour.

The body lay for two days in the villa on Uelzener Straße. Photographs and a death mask were taken, a post-mortem was carried out, and the dead man’s identity was confirmed by witnesses who had known him personally; the body was also shown to Allied correspondents. In the early hours of 26 May Austin and a few soldiers buried it in an unmarked grave in a wood near Lüneburg. The burial place was deliberately left unmarked so that it would not become a place of pilgrimage; it remains unknown to this day.

Crimes for which he never answered

His death at Lüneburg spared Himmler a trial in which he would have been one of the principal defendants. As Reichsführer-SS from 1929 and chief of the whole German police from 1936, he built the Third Reich’s apparatus of terror: the Gestapo, the concentration camp system and the Reich Security Main Office. Under his command were the Einsatzgruppen, which murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, and his men ran the extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the Wannsee Conference it was Himmler’s SS that carried out the “Final Solution of the Jewish question”, in which some six million Jews were killed. In October 1943 in Poznań he spoke openly before SS generals and party dignitaries about the “extermination of the Jewish people”.

Poland occupied a special place in his activities. As Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood he directed the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Poles from the territories annexed to the Reich and the plans for the Germanisation of the East. His apparatus carried out executions of the Polish intelligentsia, and in August 1944 Himmler passed on Hitler’s order to crush the Warsaw Uprising without mercy and raze Warsaw to the ground – one result of which was the Wola massacre. Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, camp prisoners from all over Europe and the civilian populations of the occupied countries also fell victim to the formations under his command.

His suicide was part of a wider phenomenon. As the Reich collapsed, Hitler and Goebbels took their own lives, and on 23 May – the same day that Himmler died – Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg poisoned himself at Flensburg during the arrest of the Dönitz government. Numerous senior officials of the SS, the police and the party also committed suicide. For the Allies, Himmler’s suicide was a setback: they had lost the most important witness, who could have explained the workings of the Holocaust and who had taken the decisions.

Significance

Himmler’s death closed the last chapter of his career, which he himself had wanted to end differently – as an interlocutor of the victors and a guarantor of order in defeated Germany. Although he died in captivity, his responsibility was set out at Nuremberg. At the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal, which opened in November 1945, the SS as a whole was declared a criminal organisation, and the testimony of his subordinates – among them the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and the head of Einsatzgruppe D, Otto Ohlendorf – showed the scale of the crimes for which Himmler was responsible. His flight with false papers also foreshadowed the routes by which thousands of SS men tried to escape justice in the years that followed – some of them successfully.