“If you can find the time overnight to read my literary opus, I’d be interested to hear what you think of it.”
“If there aren’t too many big words in it, I’ll give it a shot.”
[TWO]
44-46 Beerenstrasse
Zehlendorf, Berlin, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1605 20 April 1946
Cronley made himself a drink, sat down on the couch in the bar, and put his feet on the coffee table. Ginger immediately sat very close to him.
“This will probably do great damage to your ego, my love,” he said, taking Serov’s book from his jacket pocket. “But right now, I’m more interested in this book than I am in romantic cuddling.”
“Actually, so am I, Jimmy. But since I gave my copy to Max, I’ll have to share yours. You have my word that I won’t try to arouse you sexually.”
Cronley opened the book. Their eyes went to the opening page, and they read to the end without uttering a word.
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler—head of the Gestapo; the Waffen-SS; Minister of the Interior, and organizer of the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich—was born in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria, on 7 October 1900.
His father, a devout Roman Catholic who had once been tutor to the Crown Prince of Bavaria, had become headmaster of a Catholic school.
For some reason, young Himmler was not given his elementary and intermediate education in his father’s school, but rather in a Catholic school in Landshut.
Himmler served briefly as an officer cadet in the 11th Bavarian Regiment in the last days of the First World War. On separation from the service, he enrolled in the Munich Technical High School, which, in 1922, granted him a diploma in Agriculture.
He then worked briefly as a fertilizer salesman. It is not known why he left this employment. Soon afterward, he joined what was then an insignificant political organization known as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—acronym: Nazi.
The Nazi Party was headed by Adolf Hitler, an Austro-German. Hitler had served as a corporal in the trenches in Belgium, where he was gassed and temporarily blinded.
There is an interesting, though unverifiable, story that while serving as a messenger in the trenches, Hitler was attacked by a large herding dog, a Bouvier des Flandres, which bit him in the crotch, causing him eventually to lose one of his testicles. It is known that when Hitler returned to Belgium in World War II, he ordered the complete eradication of the breed, which turned out unsuccessful.
In November of 1923, during the infamous Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Himmler served as the “standard-bearer” to Ernst Röhm. Röhm, then serving as the unpaid secretary to Gregor Strasser, the grandiosely named district leader for Bavaria, Swabia, and the Palatinate. Surprising many, Röhm later acquired enough power to seriously threaten to take Hitler’s place as Führer—“leader”—of the Nazi Party.
In 1927, Himmler married, and briefly returned to poultry farming. Probably because he was spending so much time on Nazi affairs at low—or no—pay, he again went bankrupt.
Hitler came to his rescue. He named him as head of his personal black-shirted bodyguard, which then consisted of approximately two hundred men. Himmler promptly named these bodyguards the Schutzstaffel—acronym: SS—and immediately began to recruit “pure Germans” for it.
In 1930, Himmler was elected to the Reichstag. By then, both Hitler and Himmler were growing increasingly wary of Ernst Röhm, whom they suspected was trying to take over the Nazi Party. Their first step was to make the Schutzstaffel independent of Röhm’s SA. By 1933, the SS had fifty-two thousand members.
Himmler then formed the Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst—acronym: SD—under Reinhard Heydrich, a former Naval Reserve officer who had been removed from service for base and vile acts of depravity.
Himmler and Heydrich then worked together to ensure the Nazi Party’s influence in Bavaria grew.
In March 1933, Hitler took the first step in increasing Himmler’s and the SS’s power by naming him Munich police president.
Step two was naming Himmler commander of all the political police throughout Bavaria.
In September 1933, Hitler made him commander of all political police units outside Prussia and, though technically under Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy, he on 20 April 1934 became head of the Prussian police and the Geheime Staatspolizei—the secret state police, known as the Gestapo.
Two months later, on 30 June, Hitler’s and Himmler’s increasing rant against the Jewish people came to a head on what became known as Krystallnacht. This “crystal night” was a callous, mocking reference to the glass fragments from the thousands of windows of Jewish shops and hundreds of synagogues looted and then set afire by mobs under the control of the SS.
The SS also used the tempest to deal with another problem. They burst into Ernst Röhm’s room in a country inn, the Gast Haus, found him naked in bed in the act of copulating with a young male, and shot both on the spot.
They photographed the scene of the double crime—homosexuality and murder—and saw that images were widely circulated.
Thus ended the Röhm threat to take over the Nazi Party.