A Grave on the Heath

Heinrich Himmler's last journey was different. Before, wherever he had travelled, death followed him like a shadow--and the shadow fell on many, at Maidanek. Oswiecim, Buchenwald. "You find people there," he once said of his concentration camps, "with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed and deformed ones . . . a lot of cheap trash . . . the prisoners are made up of slave souls."

On his last trip, from Berlin to Flensburg to the north German moors, his shadow caught up with him. Heinrich Himmler, whom his fellow Nazis had ironically nicknamed "gentle Heinrich," had shaved his Hitlerian mustache, replaced his scholarly pince-nez with a black eye patch. He had become Herr Hitzinger. His papers were in perfect order. He loved order.

But perfect order was an anachronism, a noticeable incongruity, in conquered Germany. British guards on a bridge in Bemervoerde, noting and suspecting the perfection of Herr Hitzinger's papers, dumped him in a prison camp. After three days he declared to the camp commandant: "I am Heinrich Himmler."

Security officers rushed to the camp. They took him to a brick villa outside Lueneburg, stripped him, found a tiny blue glass vial of poison in his clothes. Then a British sergeant major and a doctor searched him--under his arms, in his ears, his hair. Finally the doctor decided to look into Himmler's mouth. The prisoner quickly ground his jaws, and fell to the floor. He had concealed a second poison vial in his mouth, and had broken it with his teeth. The potassium cyanide worked quickly:* in 15 minutes he was dead.

Cheated of a formal inquisition and execution, Himmler's captors let his body lie for two days on the floor where he had fallen. Medical authorities removed the brain, took plaster casts of the skull. Finally, a British Army detail, sworn to secrecy, buried the unembalmed body in a grave on the heath near Lueneburg. There was no coffin, no marking on the grave. The shifting sand would soon obliterate the last sign; there would be no site for a martyr's monument.

The only words spoken at the graveside came from a British Tommy: "Let the worm go to the worms."

* Flensburg rumors said Adolf Hitler had died of a lethal injection given him by his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morrell. Dr. Morrell told newsmen at Berchtesgaden that he had regularly given Hitler glucose and caffeine injections, that Hitler had refused them at the last, but said nothing of killing Hitler.

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