Female Administrators of the Third Reich by Rachel Century

Author:Rachel Century
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

She ended by begging Himmler to let her give the German people many children by the man she loved.

Unfortunately for Hüttemann, she was not the only person who wrote to Himmler to discuss the merits of her marriage application to Liebehenschel. Baer wrote to Himmler on 3 July 1944, giving an account of his trip to Auschwitz to break the news to Liebehenschel. He also expressed his view that it was impossible for an SS man to have sexual intercourse with someone who had had a relationship with a Jew, let alone marry them.48 Despite being told to relinquish his relationship with Hüttemann, Liebehenschel persisted. Liebehenschel’s divorce had come through in December 1943, and the couple married in a secret civil ceremony in Auschwitz in January 1944.49 After further correspondence, they succeeded in gaining Himmler’s consent. On 13 October 1944, because they were expecting a child, Himmler finally gave the couple permission to marry, on the condition that Liebehenschel took responsibility for the marriage. It was on this day that their son was born. Once permission had been granted the couple did not delay, and were officially married three days later by the registrar in Auschwitz.50 While Himmler himself did not deem it vital for children to be born legitimately, he recognized that many did hold this view. He therefore granted them permission to marry solely because of the expected child. He also wanted to avoid a scandal that would disgrace the entire SS.51

Liebehenschel was the commandant of Lublin concentration camp until its evacuation in July 1944, when he was transferred to Trieste, under the command of the senior commander of the SS and Police, Odilo Globocnik. Hüttemann and their son moved to Italy to be with Liebehenschel. After the war, Liebehenschel was tried in Cracow, with other members of the SS garrison of Auschwitz-Birkenau.52

Liebehenschel, Streicher and Dannecker all held important positions within the Nazi infrastructure, and succeeded in their applications to marry secretaries they met through that infrastructure. For both Streicher and Dannecker, it was a relatively simple process. In Dannecker’s case, it was his future wife’s expectant state that guaranteed their success. Similarly for Liebehenschel, it was Hüttemann’s pregnancy that proved the decisive factor in their application, despite her alleged previous relationship with a Jew. A high value was placed on children born in wedlock, and so permission to marry was granted.

Applications were often far from straightforward, but the process was not black and white: failure to meet requirements did not necessarily preclude success. Like Liebehenschel, SS-Obersturmbannführer Friedrich K. was also married when he fell in love with a secretary, who worked in the RSHA with him. Friedrich, who worked for the Gestapo, applied for a divorce from his first wife on the grounds of her hip defect, and he claimed that the SS marriage laws should have prevented the marriage in the first place. Once the divorce was granted, he was able to apply to marry his mistress, by whom he already had a child. She was the widow of a former SS colleague, and a secretary.

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