The Office of the Reichsführer-SS
Berlin
1430 26 April 1943
“Herr Reichsführer,” Frau Gertrud Hassler’s high-pitched voice announced, “Deputy Minister von Löwzer of the Foreign Ministry, Ribbentrop’s office, asks to see you.”
“Ask the gentleman to wait a minute or two, please,” Himmler said courteously, and returned to reading the teletyped report from Warsaw. It both baffled and infuriated him.
If the report was to be believed, and he had no reason not to believe it, the day before, “a group estimated to number approximately 2,000 Jews” in the Warsaw ghetto had risen up against their captors, protesting a pending “transport” to resettlement in the East. “The East” was a euphemism for the Treblinka concentration camp, but the damned Jews were not supposed to know that.
For one thing, a revolt of Jews against German authority is on its face unthinkable.
For another, these vermin, in their walled ghetto, have obviously somehow managed to obtain a few small arms. Someone will answer for this.
And even if it isn’t “a few small arms,” but many, and every slimy Hebrew in the ghetto has somehow managed to lay his hands on a pistol or a rifle, there is in Warsaw—in addition to the SS personnel—a division of German soldiers, a division of German soldiers!!!; the uprising should have been put down minutes after it became known.
According to the report, the uprising had been going on for twenty-four hours, and there was no estimate of when it would be contained.
The Reichsführer-SS grew aware that his knuckles on the hand pressing down the teletypewriter paper to keep it from curling were white with tension. When he lifted it from his desk, the hand was trembling.
Obviously, I am very angry, and—even though I have every right to be—therefore I should not make decisions that might be influenced by that anger.
One should never discipline children when angry, he continued, musing, his mind taking something of a leap. One should discipline children very carefully, and with love in one’s heart, not anger. And then his focus returned to the matter at hand: My God, that’s incredible!—filthy Jewish swine confined to a ghetto having the effrontery to rise in arms against the German State! Whoever is responsible for this incredible breakdown of order will have to be disciplined. Perhaps sent to a concentration camp, or shot.
But I will make that decision calmly, when I am no longer angry.
The Reichsführer-SS pulled open a narrow drawer in the desk, rolled the teletypewriter print out into a narrow tube, then put it in the drawer and closed it.
Then he went to his private toilet, emptied his bladder, studied himself in the mirror, decided to have his hair cut within the next day or so, adjusted his necktie, and went back to his desk.
He pushed the SPEAK lever on his interoffice communication device. “Would you show the Herr Deputy Foreign Minister in, please?” he asked courteously.
The left of the double doors opened a moment later.
“Deputy Minister von Löwzer, Herr Reichsführer-SS,” Frau Hassler announced.
Georg Friedrich von Löwzer, a plump forty-five-year-old in a too-small black suit, was carrying a leather briefcase. He took two steps inside the office and raised his arm and hand straight out from his shoulder in the Nazi salute.
“Heil Hitler!” he said.
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler stood up and returned a less formal salute: He bent his arm at the elbow and replied, “Heil Hitler!”, then added, with a smile: “My dear von Löwzer, what an unexpected pleasure to see you.”
“I regret, Herr Reichsführer-SS, that I am the bearer of unpleasant news.”
Now what?
He smiled at von Löwzer. “Of such importance that someone of your stature in the Foreign Ministry has to bear it?”
“I believe when the Herr Reichsführer-SS reads the document, he will understand Herr Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop’s concern that it be seen immediately and by no one but yourself,” von Löwzer said. He unlocked the briefcase, took a sealed, yellowish envelope from it, and handed it to Himmler.
“Please, have a chair,” Himmler said graciously. “Can I have Frau Hassler get you a coffee? Something a little stronger?”
“No, thank you, Herr Reichsführer-SS.”
Himmler stood behind his desk and attempted to open the envelope flap with his fingernails. He failed in that attempt and had to reach for his letter opener—a miniature version of the dagger worn by SS officers. It had been a gift to him from one of the graduating classes of the SS Officer Candidate School at Bad Tolz.
When the envelope had been slit, he found that it contained another sheet of teletypewriter paper. He laid it on his desk, then placed a coffee cup at its top and his fingers at the bottom to prevent curling.