Himmler's offer

Late on the evening of 23 April 1945, at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck, two men met who in normal times would have had nothing in common. One was Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, chief of the German police and Minister of the Interior, the chief executor of the Holocaust. The other was the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of King Gustaf V and vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross. Their conversation, held by candlelight because an air raid had cut the electricity, dragged on into the early hours of 24 April. In it Himmler declared that Adolf Hitler was finished and would be dead within a few days, and that he himself now had a free hand. He asked Bernadotte to pass a proposal to the Western Allies: Germany would surrender to the Americans and the British but would go on fighting the Red Army.

The offer was made without Hitler’s knowledge and in defiance of his repeated prohibitions on any negotiations. The Allies rejected it within two days. When news of it reached the press on 28 April, Hitler branded Himmler a traitor – a few days after he had branded Hermann Göring’s telegram treason.

The intermediary from Stockholm

Bernadotte was neither head of the Red Cross nor a representative of the Allies. Born in 1895 and a member of the Swedish royal family, he was vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross (its president was his uncle, Prince Carl). In 1943–1944 he had organised exchanges of seriously wounded prisoners of war between Germany and the Western Allies through the Swedish port of Gothenburg. In the winter of 1945 the Swedish government, under pressure from the Danes and Norwegians, sent him to Germany to get Scandinavian prisoners out of the camps.

Access to Himmler was opened up for him by two men from the Reichsführer’s circle. Himmler’s personal masseur, Felix Kersten, who had been living in Stockholm since 1943, had long used his influence over his patient on behalf of individual prisoners. The head of SS foreign intelligence, Walter Schellenberg, for his part, was trying to persuade Himmler that the war was lost and that the only chance lay in an agreement with the West behind Hitler’s back. Himmler had already sounded out such possibilities – among others through the Swiss politician Jean-Marie Musy, thanks to whom a transport of some 1,200 Jews left the Theresienstadt ghetto for Switzerland in February 1945.

Bernadotte met Himmler several times: on 19 February and 2 April at the SS sanatorium at Hohenlychen, and finally on 21 April. He obtained permission to gather Scandinavian prisoners in the Neuengamme camp near Hamburg, and later to take them to Sweden. By then Himmler was a man without real military power: in March he had lost command of Army Group Vistula, where Gotthard Heinrici replaced him, and his standing with Hitler had clearly weakened.

The White Buses

The operation Bernadotte directed has gone down in history as the White Buses. From mid-March 1945 convoys of Swedish buses, lorries and ambulances painted white with red crosses, crewed by volunteers from the Swedish army, travelled across the disintegrating Reich, under fire and bombing from the air. They brought Danes and Norwegians from various camps to Neuengamme and then took them through Denmark to Sweden.

In April, as the apparatus of the Reich fell apart, the operation was extended to prisoners of other nationalities, above all women from the Ravensbrück camp – French, Polish, Dutch, Belgian and Jewish women. According to Bernadotte’s own account and the Swedish press of May 1945, some 15,000 people had been taken out by the end of April, including about 8,000 Danes and Norwegians and about 7,000 women of other nationalities; in May and June, after Germany’s surrender, thousands more former prisoners were brought to Sweden. Estimates vary depending on whether only the Red Cross transports are counted or later evacuations as well.

The operation also has its dark side. The Swedish historian Ingrid Lomfors and other researchers have shown that, to make room for the Scandinavians in Neuengamme, the Swedish buses in March moved more than two thousand sick prisoners of other nationalities – French, Poles, Soviet citizens – to other camps, where many of them died. After the war the dispute over credit turned into a feud between Bernadotte and Kersten: the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, drawing on the masseur’s papers, accused the count of reluctance to rescue Jews. Other researchers, among them the Swedish political scientist Sune Persson, found these accusations to be untrue.

The conversation with Norbert Masur

On 20 April Himmler was in Berlin for Hitler’s last birthday and assured him of his loyalty. A few hours later, during the night of 20/21 April, at Kersten’s Hartzwalde estate north of Berlin, he met Norbert Masur, the Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress. The man who had directed the extermination of Europe’s Jews received the representative of a Jewish organisation – and, according to Masur’s account, spent much of the conversation justifying the Reich’s policy. He claimed, among other things, that the crematoria in the camps had been built to burn the bodies of victims of typhus epidemics. At the same time the first reports were already coming in from the Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated by the British.

The concrete result of the conversation was a promise to release a thousand Jewish women from Ravensbrück, who – to hide the gesture from Hitler – were to be registered as “Poles”, together with a number of prisoners of other nationalities. According to Masur’s account, Himmler also gave assurances that the camps would no longer be evacuated by death marches; in practice this promise was not kept. On the morning of 21 April Himmler met Bernadotte and agreed to the removal of the women from Ravensbrück.

The proposal from Lübeck

Two days later, on 23 April, the situation had changed fundamentally. The previous day Hitler had declared that he would remain in the encircled city of Berlin and die there – news of his breakdown at the conference of 22 April quickly reached the dignitaries outside the capital. Himmler, encouraged by Schellenberg, decided that his time had come. Through Schellenberg he asked Bernadotte for a meeting, which took place in Lübeck late on the evening of 23 April.

According to Bernadotte’s account, Himmler said that Hitler was probably already dead, and if not, would die within a few days. In this situation he, Himmler, had freedom of action and was ready to surrender on the Western Front, but not on the Eastern Front, where Germany would go on fighting “until the Western Allies arrived”. Bernadotte, who believed from the outset that the proposal had no chance, demanded that it should also cover occupied Denmark and Norway; according to his account, Himmler agreed. At the count’s request Himmler set out his proposal in a letter to the Swedish Foreign Minister. Bernadotte flew with it to Stockholm, and on 24 April the Swedish government passed it on to the British and American ministers.

Himmler’s calculation rested on an illusion shared by many Nazis: that at the last moment the Americans and British would turn against the Soviet Union and Germany would become their ally. Yet as early as January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill had proclaimed the principle of unconditional surrender, and in February 1945 at Yalta the Big Three had agreed on the division of Germany into occupation zones. Neither of the Western powers intended to risk a break with Moscow at a time when the war with Japan was still going on and Soviet and American troops were due to meet in the middle of Germany any day.

The Allied refusal

The message reached London and Washington on 25 April. President Harry Truman, in office for less than two weeks – since Roosevelt’s death – discussed it that day by telephone with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The two were agreed: the only possible answer was unconditional surrender on all fronts simultaneously, to all three powers, including the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin was informed at once of the offer and the reply, and thanked them for their loyalty. The answer was conveyed to Himmler through the Swedes over the following days. The Western Allies thereby avoided a trap that could have broken up the coalition in the last days of the war.

Treason in Hitler’s eyes

The negotiations were meant to remain secret, but the news leaked. On 28 April the Reuters agency reported from San Francisco, where the founding conference of the United Nations was in session, that Himmler had offered to surrender to the Western Allies. That evening the BBC broadcast the report, and in the bunker it was picked up by the radio monitoring service. For years Hitler had called Himmler “der treue Heinrich” (“loyal Heinrich”) and regarded him – along with Goebbels – as the most loyal of his men. According to witnesses, he flew into a rage and called it the most shameful betrayal in history.

Its first victim was Himmler’s liaison officer at headquarters, SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, the brother-in-law of Eva Braun. The day before he had been detained in his Berlin flat in civilian clothes, ready to flee. After the news of the negotiations he was interrogated, and during the night of 28/29 April he was shot; the circumstances of the execution are not entirely clear. Himmler himself was now beyond Hitler’s reach. Contrary to an often repeated version, Hitler did not order him to be shot but ordered his arrest: he entrusted this task to the new commander of the Luftwaffe, Field Marshal Robert von Greim, who flew out of Berlin during the night of 28/29 April. In his political testament of 29 April Hitler expelled Himmler, like Göring, from the party and from all his offices, accusing both of having negotiated with the enemy without his knowledge.

Himmler was not arrested. He was in northern Germany, near the headquarters of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, and still hoped to play a role in post-war Germany. Dönitz, whom Hitler had named as his successor, did not take him into his government and on 6 May dismissed him from all his posts. Himmler tried to hide under a false name; on 21 May he was detained by a British patrol, and on 23 May 1945 in Lüneburg he committed suicide by biting on a cyanide capsule.

Significance

Himmler’s offer was the last of the attempts by the leaders of the Third Reich to split the anti-Hitler coalition. All of them rested on the same conviction: that the alliance of the Western democracies with the Soviet Union was unnatural and bound to break up. Truman’s and Churchill’s reply showed that in April 1945 the coalition was too strong for that. Germany’s surrender could only be total and made to all the victors. When at the beginning of May the Dönitz government still tried to play for time, the Western Allies accepted only the surrender of troops fighting directly in front of them, and the surrender of Germany as a whole only to all the Allies simultaneously.

The episode also finally shattered the supreme leadership of the Reich. Within a few days Hitler had cast off the two men who for twelve years had been pillars of his power: Göring and Himmler. Himmler’s contacts with the Swedes, on the other hand, had a dimension he himself had not foreseen. The White Buses and the talks with Masur made it possible in the last weeks of the war to get more than ten thousand people out of the camps, including thousands of women from Ravensbrück, many of them Polish and Jewish. For Himmler it was part of a game for his own future – an attempt to show the West that he was someone it could talk to. For those rescued, it meant life. Bernadotte, who through these efforts became known throughout the world, was assassinated in 1948 while serving as UN mediator in Palestine.