Himmler Acted Without Hitler’s Knowledge

This claim is the conjuring trick that the deniers fall back on when they have been forced to admit, against the documentary record, that the killing happened. They concede the killing but assign it to Himmler personally and exonerate Hitler. The structure of the SS makes this impossible. Himmler was Hitler’s appointee, was personally loyal to Hitler, reported to Hitler regularly, sought Hitler’s approval for major operational decisions, and recorded in his own appointment diary the meetings at which the killing was discussed with Hitler. The argument that Hitler did not know what Himmler was doing is the argument that Hitler did not know what his own most loyal subordinate was reporting to him at their twice-weekly meetings.

The Himmler-Hitler relationship

Heinrich Himmler had been Reichsführer-SS since 1929 and a personal subordinate of Hitler since 1923. By the period of the killing operation (1941 to 1945), the SS had grown from a personal bodyguard formation of the early 1920s into a parallel state apparatus controlling the police, the security services, the concentration camps, the racial policy bureaucracy, and substantial military formations (the Waffen-SS). Throughout this growth, Himmler had operated as Hitler’s subordinate. He sought Hitler’s instructions on every major decision; he reported on operational progress; he framed his own actions as the execution of Hitler’s will.

The relationship is documented in Himmler’s appointment diary (Dienstkalender), which was captured by the Allies in 1945, edited by Peter Witte and others, and published as Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 in 1999. The diary records Himmler’s meetings with Hitler in detail: the dates, the attendees, the subjects discussed. It records meetings at which the killing was the subject. The entry for 18 December 1941, for example, records a meeting between Himmler and Hitler at the Wolfsschanze with the agenda item “Judenfrage / als Partisanen auszurotten” (Jewish question / to be exterminated as partisans). The phrase is in Himmler’s own hand. The decision to characterise the killing of Jews as anti-partisan operations was a coordination decision between Himmler and Hitler, recorded in Himmler’s own diary, with Hitler present.

The Goebbels diary

The Goebbels diary entries provide the parallel record from another senior official. Joseph Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Propaganda and a member of Hitler’s inner circle. His diary, written in shorthand and dictated to a secretary almost daily across the entire war, was captured at the end of the war and has been published in full (in the Elke Fröhlich critical edition of 1993 to 2008). The diary records Goebbels’s frequent conversations with Hitler about the killing operation, in which Hitler is recorded as approving, encouraging and requiring the operation. The entry for 27 March 1942 reads: “Beginning with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported eastward from the General Government. The procedure is fairly barbaric and not to be described in detail. Of the Jews not much will remain. On the whole one can say that approximately sixty per cent will have to be liquidated, only forty per cent can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is responsible for this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure which does not attract too much attention. Thank God, the Jews now have something to laugh about, and their prophecy in the Führer’s Reichstag speech is being fulfilled in the most terrible manner.”

The Goebbels diary is not the testimony of a man who thought his master was unaware of the operation. It is the testimony of a senior official discussing with his colleagues an operation that he understood to be the express policy of the head of state, who had himself prophesied it in his Reichstag speech. The entries on the killing run through the diary across 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945, with regular references to Hitler’s approval and Hitler’s expectations.

The Hitler speeches

Hitler made repeated public speeches in 1941 and 1942 in which he referred explicitly to the prophecy of his 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, in which he had predicted “the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe” if a new world war broke out. In his speeches of 30 January 1941, 30 January 1942, 24 February 1942, 30 September 1942, 8 November 1942, 24 February 1943, 13 February 1945 and others, Hitler returned to the prophecy and made clear that he was bringing it into effect. The 30 September 1942 speech, broadcast nationally, contained the lines: “There were once those Jews in Germany who laughed at my prophecies. I do not know whether they are still laughing today, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh. But I can also assure you now: they will lose the inclination everywhere. With these prophecies I will be proven right.”

The speeches are public, broadcast at the time, in print, in the standard Hitler-speech editions. They are the voice of the head of state declaring that the killing he was prophesying was being executed. The argument that he did not know what was happening cannot be reconciled with his own public statements about what was happening.

The Höss and Eichmann testimony

Both Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann, in independent testimony given many years apart, attributed their orders ultimately to Hitler through Himmler. Höss testified at Nuremberg in April 1946 that Himmler had personally summoned him to Berlin in summer 1941 and told him: “The Führer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out this order.” Eichmann, in his Argentine recordings made by Willem Sassen in 1957 (later transcribed and published as Eichmann Tapes) and in his Jerusalem trial testimony of 1961, gave the same chain of authority: Hitler to Himmler to Heydrich to himself. Both men were in custody facing capital charges; neither had any incentive to invent the chain of authority. Both gave the same chain.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that Hitler was unaware is harmful because it relocates responsibility from the head of state to a single subordinate, and so allows the moral discredit of the operation to be partially detached from the German state and the German political leadership. Hitler’s biographers (Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, Ian Kershaw, Peter Longerich, Volker Ullrich) have all rejected the claim on the surviving evidence. The Himmler diary records the meetings; the Goebbels diary records the conversations; the Hitler speeches record the public declarations; the Höss and Eichmann testimony records the chain of orders. The denial requires all of this material to be either forged or misread. It is neither.

What does Himmler’s appointment diary record? What did Goebbels write in his own hand? What did Hitler say in his public speeches? What did Höss and Eichmann attest under oath?

See also

• Adolf Hitler
• Heinrich Himmler
• Adolf Eichmann
• Rudolf Höss
• Hitler Did Not Know About the Holocaust
• The Eichmann Trial 1961

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Sources

• Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, edited by Peter Witte, Michael Wildt, Martina Voigt, Dieter Pohl, Peter Klein, Christian Gerlach, Christoph Dieckmann and Andrej Angrick, Hamburger Edition, 1999
• Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, edited by Elke Fröhlich, K. G. Saur, 1993 to 2008, full critical edition
• Adolf Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen 1932 bis 1945, edited by Max Domarus, four volumes, Süddeutscher Verlag, 1962 to 1963
• Adolf Hitler, Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, with the original “destruction of the Jewish race” prophecy
• Rudolf Höss, testimony at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 15 April 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 11, Nuremberg, 1947
• Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz, edited by Martin Broszat, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958
• Adolf Eichmann, Sassen tapes (1957), partial transcription in Jochen von Lang and Claus Sibyll, Eichmann Interrogated, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983; Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Knopf, 2014
• Adolf Eichmann, testimony at his trial, Jerusalem, 1961, transcript in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, nine volumes, State of Israel, 1992 to 1995
• Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, W. W. Norton, 2000
• Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life, Oxford University Press, 2012
• Volker Ullrich, Hitler: A Biography, two volumes, Knopf, 2016 and 2020
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Adolf Hitler” and “Heinrich Himmler”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org