Empyrean (Part Fifteen)
Posted: Wed Jan 01, 2025 9:47 pm
Douglas Mercer
January 1 2025
Continued from Empyrean (Part Fourteen)
HEYDRICH
When Reinhard Heidrich was cut down by the bullets of England and craven Jews one line of the future was cut off forever; but as always our people have many such lines in store if only one destiny. It was May 27 1942 when Heyrdich, the Commander of the Reich Security Main Office, and the Lord Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, was being driven in his Mercedes down a hair pin turn from his Castle Fastness and was cut down by assassins sent by England; I must admit that it was quite a shock to us, not quite the shock that the near turn around at Stalingrad was, but a great shock nevertheless; but as the poet reminds us the course of true love never once ran smoothly. Valiant Heydrich was wounded in the gunfire and died eight days later; at his funeral were all of the leaders of the Reich in their impeccable and emblazoned finery and from my reading of the files and in many conversations it was a sacred event where all realized the bitterness of an enemy that could by vanquished only by total victory.
In the natural course of events it would have been Reinhard Heydrich who would have been the heir and successor. Chosen by Himmler to foment and create the counterintelligence arm of the SS; we all are amused at the story of how Himmler cancelled the interview with Himmler and Lina sent him anyway; and how Heydrich, having no intelligence experience whatsoever, bluffed his way through the audition on the strength of his reading in spy novels; he had been discharged from the Navy under dubious circumstances and found in the SS what a man always wants to find: his life work and the reason that he had been put on this earth. His calm, and imperturbable demeanor and his icy stare, gallant manners and implacable will led Hitler to bestow on him the informal moniker which was the highest accolade imaginable: the man with the iron heart. It was on such men that Hitler knew our future depended, and it was well known that from the stepping stone of Bohemia and Moravia he wanted to send him to Paris, and that after the war he was to be his most faithful deputy in the grand adventure that lay ahead.
He had put an end to the SA in those bloody days of the knife; he consolidated police forces; he helped Himmler develop the Gottglaubig movement by creating a Germanic Religion; he carried out the salient night and fog decree by dispatching enemies of the German state in occupied territories; organized our night of crystal; and at Wannsee took control of our most pressing problem of how to achieve a Jew free Europe, the jewel in our crown; this alone would be enough to send a man into the echelons of the immortals at Valhalla where he surely resides; but in death his image as an ice cold killer and unreconstructed defender of the German Realm began to take on mythical proportions; many was the man who styled himself after the hero: cool, sleek, debonair, charming, and with freezing blood and a hard and steely stare; in fact he was what we all dreamed of: the perfect German man, what the coming man would take as his prototype, and has. And so it is no surprise that in the Sacred Tombs he is given pride of place to be on the next terrace before our great Fuhrer; in fact as I begin to close this last piece of my writing out I plan to travel there in the next few weeks to pay my respects to this important part of our past, even as the future begins its ascent.
KAMMLER
The man who in fact succeeded Adolf Hitler, Hans Kammler, is a man somewhat similar to Heydrich, though his ascent and itinerary through our ranks was quite different: he became the Great Fuhrer at 5:50 AM on October 9 1962 at the exact moment Hitler was pronounced dead. It was in some ways a shocking moment, the man who had guided us through struggle and bitterness, who had rose above everything he faced with an unnerving strength, who had conquered our enemies, and who had brought us peace, and who had steered us on the special path towards our great fate, was gone; but in other respects it was a quite superfluous and quotidian event; so magisterial and secure had been his leadership that, as he would often say in his torrential late night soliloquies, the German state, that is the German people, could run without a leader, and of their own accord; indeed any private in the army could step in; it was this that he was most proud of; having been so great he made himself most unnecessary.
The vision and the method had been implanted and was now an automatic process; when Kammler did take the helm he assured us all of what we already knew, that except for the meticulous endless refinement which the Germans are always known for (never settle for perfection ran the joke) he planned to make no changes in our course; it is true that over time he became more and more preoccupied with the issue of rockets and of space; assuring us that while we will always be true to the earth our destiny was equally always in the stars, that whatever nostalgia we had should be reserved for the future alone; and he also assured that the English and the Americans were involved in this process and the best men from their universities flocked to the massive building projects on the Northern Plain which became a hive of frontier and blue sky thinking and has, so far, set our men and our crafts far across space and given us glamourous glimpses of the future. They say that the building which sits on its far northern tier, where the unclassifiable project appears to meet its end, was designed by him, and so great is his stature etched on the façade in the vestibule are the words created by Hans Kammler as a gift to his people.
Quite appropriately Hans Kammler got his start as builder, what the Americans would call a real estate developer. For it is creating, making and building that is at the very core of who we are as a people. Born in Stettin in 1901 Kammler served heroically in the Rossbach Freikorps. Studying civil engineering from 1919 to 1923 at the School of Technology in the Free State of Danzig after practical years of local building and housing projects he was awarded a doctorate in Engineering (1932). He joined the Party in 1931, not early enough to have been an old fighter, but early enough to avoid any and all suspicion that he was a March Violet. Indeed, so fanatical was his devotion to ideology that he became something of a fearsome person in some quarters. And except for those who knew him and his unending and undying tenacity his meteoric rise in the apparatus and bureaucracy of the state was truly astounding and startling; it was as if before him lay a carved river which he flowed across in an effortless glide.
Joining the elite SS in 1933 he was soon named head of all aviation building, and soon everyone in this department learned that he was a virtual whirlwind; seemingly never needing to sleep, always being full of bountiful and copious ideas, his brain and his mouth in perfect concert as he spewed forth unrelenting streams and series of ideas upon ideas; indeed, perhaps the story that is most told of him is that in the depths of late 1941 as he was busy making the rounds at 3:30AM he learned of a task that needed to be completed now, and when he learned that the men were sleeping he proceeded to take a machine gun into the dormitory and fired a few well placed rounds in the ceiling to wake them and spur on the work; perhaps a bit eccentric but successful. Indeed, perhaps even more than Heydrich who was a pure administrator, and Speer who was soon seen as an opportunist and bourgeois relic who had neither the heart of the stomach of a true believer, it was Kammler who became preeminent as the ideal German man.
Blindingly intelligent with a heart of stone, with cold blood and a flair for perfection, he was endlessly inventive and tirelessly energetic, and also a true visionary; for him and for the men he trained there was no contradiction between the life and philosophy of blood and soil and the techniques and requirements of a futuristic technological society; that indeed they were hand in glove; for as his speeches now always indicate what man is is a being who can never remain in place but must always evolve and develop; and that no man had such deep reverence for the German land and the German forest and the blue and green earth; indeed he said that technical marvels were the apotheosis of being true to the earth; provided they were respectful of and blended in with the natural landscape and were aesthetically beautiful, so unlike the eyesores and the monstrosities which dotted the American landscape and small towns, cities and suburbs; indeed for him it was techne which was art, and that technology was art and that all of it was the wonderful fruit of the German spirit.
Above all Kammler was an administrator and an organizer. Famously Adolf Hitler was none of these things, his forte was blue sky thinking, and his monologues were such that those who were in his presence learned to commit those words to memory; but it was left to othesr to take the stray vague hint or the occasional clear directive and make them tangible. Kammler he called his “executor” not without a bit of grim humor or course, but it was true, no sooner had Hitler spoken than Kammler had brought it into a palpable reality; he was part of that younger generation of managers, and technocrats and administrators, and systems analysts whose skills were so admired (and sometimes feared) by the Old Fighters. Free to obey was their watchword—free to obey.
They were marvels this cohort, and none so more than Kammler. By the late 1940s he had created a vast network of systems that spanned the continent, and master plans were in place, every last detail on paper before the reality unfolded in the world. They say that in 1943 (so the joke ran) that you could not start a car or turn a screw in the Reich without his signature; but as peace was achieved this no longer became the reality; far from being dictatorial the central tenet of task management (for such was the rubric under which his theory went) was to create independent entities at the level of the department and the worker. In the ecosystem of task management the task manager was to function as the creator of the team and the trainer of the team (or teams) across the spectrum of competencies and functions; the function of the worker will simply be to produce. In the task management system Kammler created anything and everything that hinders training and production is deemed an evil and the job of the task manager is to extirpate them with extreme prejudice. The team must become an unrelenting factory of whatever it is called on to produce, and distractions of all kinds must be totally eliminated. For time as he always said is the essence itself and the task manager protects and husbands it with a ferocity that is feral. Kammler was certainly that: feral But as the Americans are wont to say: nothing succeeds like success or, alternately, the proof is in the pudding.
***
An old story still circulates that when Speer’s father first met Hitler he nearly had a nervous breakdown in his presence (1934) and I do not doubt it. As we all know Hitler had an unerring intuition about people and when he sensed weakness he had a penchant for boring into their souls with his gaze and there is no reason to think that in Herr Speer’s case he did not do just that. The son himself is now in respectable retirement, though we hear that he is ailing. All honor the good things he did but we all know too that in his inner man (the only thing that counts!), in his heart of hearts he was not one of us, not one of the inner magical circle where the spells are cast. The same things goes for Von Braun; in his case so fecund was his brain that we would consult with him before his passing in 1977. But it was a confirmed policy of the Reich that when they had made their signal services to the cause of Volk that we don’t make window into men’s souls. After all it is confirmed wisdom that from time to time the less we say about it the better.
Kammler on the other hand was a fanatic. I see him at symposiums from time to time and at the gatherings; and have had one chance to meet him in a small group. He exudes health and concentration; so focused is he it is as if he is immersed in a perpetual clear state so much so that when he speaks to you it as if the world is bearing down on you; and you know the moment he leaves what he said is the furthest thing from his mind thoughts though, if prompted, he could recall it a moment’s notice; it was this almost unnatural quality that impressed itself on his contemporaries in the 1930s but it was the results that he always attained which led them to be in awe; being plucked out of the section of the garden allotment (as if out of nowhere that his) he went from the Aviation Department to Reich Ministry Of Armaments in V2 underground production; and he began a huge fuel storage facility in Thuringia under the Mittelwerke GmbH.
Kammler became an indispensable figure in the armaments efforts of the SS, so much so, that he was only answerable to Heinrich Himmler himself. Speer made Kammler his representative for special construction tasks, expecting that Kammler would commit himself to working in harmony with the ministry's main construction committee. But in March 1941 Kammler had Goring appoint him as his delegate for special buildings under the fighter aircraft program, which made him one of the war economy's most important managers. In April 1943, Hitler gave Kammler full control over jet-aircraft production which he knew was indispensable to our people becoming a planetary people. It was as if he was moving from portfolio to portfolio but as he is supposed to have always said that when a man begins acting and delves into something so deeply he loses his sense of self there is no telling how much he can accomplish.
But of course his piece de resistance was the postwar building of the crematoria, the so-called assembly lines of death as it came to be known among the wags who not only had seen it all but were men of the world. I can tell you that no mausoleum has ever been such an aesthetic marvel as these facilities, they were spare and sleek and clean and had the hallmark of German efficiency, not a part was wasted and the immaculate white look from the outside gave the idea that some kind of pristine rite was happening in their depths. Once the blue print and models were complete and the load, burn, cool, reload process was in place all of them which dotted the landscape were facsimiles of one another; it was truly his greatest achievement, that is until he ascended to power and drove the project of putting us into space; and if you have never tried to turn some eight million bodies into ash and smoke you have yet to conceptualize the greatness. For what he was above all was a task manager, and Task Management was the title of a pamphlet he wrote in order to inculcate his ethos and broadcast it as widely as possible, and if he ended it in a flourish of rhetoric that is only all to the good for like Hitler himself he was always cool eyed but also man of fire and passion:
The task manager is the life force itself; and, as such, is the future of work. For life is a test but the kind of test it is is a performance test. When an airplane part is created it is immediately subjected to phenomenal pressure of such intensity and force that it exceeds by a factor of a thousand any it will meet in reality. These stress tests perform the salutary function of ascertaining the only thing that matters about the object: if it can pass the test of time, which is the test of performance. Because should that plane go down and the bodies be liquefied in the blast of the impact, no one wants to be the man answerable to that conflagration. Safe to say that the task manager of the future we envision will never be ensnared in such a case but, having exhorted the life force itself in the world of his team, he will glide gracefully and effortlessly through the building as he watches the force he embodies fly smoothly through the air to its known destination of always flying, always sailing, always advancing, always learning, always working, always succeeding — and, what is more and is the most essential thing of all: always living.
Continued at Empyrean (Part Sixteen)
January 1 2025
Continued from Empyrean (Part Fourteen)
HEYDRICH
When Reinhard Heidrich was cut down by the bullets of England and craven Jews one line of the future was cut off forever; but as always our people have many such lines in store if only one destiny. It was May 27 1942 when Heyrdich, the Commander of the Reich Security Main Office, and the Lord Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, was being driven in his Mercedes down a hair pin turn from his Castle Fastness and was cut down by assassins sent by England; I must admit that it was quite a shock to us, not quite the shock that the near turn around at Stalingrad was, but a great shock nevertheless; but as the poet reminds us the course of true love never once ran smoothly. Valiant Heydrich was wounded in the gunfire and died eight days later; at his funeral were all of the leaders of the Reich in their impeccable and emblazoned finery and from my reading of the files and in many conversations it was a sacred event where all realized the bitterness of an enemy that could by vanquished only by total victory.
In the natural course of events it would have been Reinhard Heydrich who would have been the heir and successor. Chosen by Himmler to foment and create the counterintelligence arm of the SS; we all are amused at the story of how Himmler cancelled the interview with Himmler and Lina sent him anyway; and how Heydrich, having no intelligence experience whatsoever, bluffed his way through the audition on the strength of his reading in spy novels; he had been discharged from the Navy under dubious circumstances and found in the SS what a man always wants to find: his life work and the reason that he had been put on this earth. His calm, and imperturbable demeanor and his icy stare, gallant manners and implacable will led Hitler to bestow on him the informal moniker which was the highest accolade imaginable: the man with the iron heart. It was on such men that Hitler knew our future depended, and it was well known that from the stepping stone of Bohemia and Moravia he wanted to send him to Paris, and that after the war he was to be his most faithful deputy in the grand adventure that lay ahead.
He had put an end to the SA in those bloody days of the knife; he consolidated police forces; he helped Himmler develop the Gottglaubig movement by creating a Germanic Religion; he carried out the salient night and fog decree by dispatching enemies of the German state in occupied territories; organized our night of crystal; and at Wannsee took control of our most pressing problem of how to achieve a Jew free Europe, the jewel in our crown; this alone would be enough to send a man into the echelons of the immortals at Valhalla where he surely resides; but in death his image as an ice cold killer and unreconstructed defender of the German Realm began to take on mythical proportions; many was the man who styled himself after the hero: cool, sleek, debonair, charming, and with freezing blood and a hard and steely stare; in fact he was what we all dreamed of: the perfect German man, what the coming man would take as his prototype, and has. And so it is no surprise that in the Sacred Tombs he is given pride of place to be on the next terrace before our great Fuhrer; in fact as I begin to close this last piece of my writing out I plan to travel there in the next few weeks to pay my respects to this important part of our past, even as the future begins its ascent.
KAMMLER
The man who in fact succeeded Adolf Hitler, Hans Kammler, is a man somewhat similar to Heydrich, though his ascent and itinerary through our ranks was quite different: he became the Great Fuhrer at 5:50 AM on October 9 1962 at the exact moment Hitler was pronounced dead. It was in some ways a shocking moment, the man who had guided us through struggle and bitterness, who had rose above everything he faced with an unnerving strength, who had conquered our enemies, and who had brought us peace, and who had steered us on the special path towards our great fate, was gone; but in other respects it was a quite superfluous and quotidian event; so magisterial and secure had been his leadership that, as he would often say in his torrential late night soliloquies, the German state, that is the German people, could run without a leader, and of their own accord; indeed any private in the army could step in; it was this that he was most proud of; having been so great he made himself most unnecessary.
The vision and the method had been implanted and was now an automatic process; when Kammler did take the helm he assured us all of what we already knew, that except for the meticulous endless refinement which the Germans are always known for (never settle for perfection ran the joke) he planned to make no changes in our course; it is true that over time he became more and more preoccupied with the issue of rockets and of space; assuring us that while we will always be true to the earth our destiny was equally always in the stars, that whatever nostalgia we had should be reserved for the future alone; and he also assured that the English and the Americans were involved in this process and the best men from their universities flocked to the massive building projects on the Northern Plain which became a hive of frontier and blue sky thinking and has, so far, set our men and our crafts far across space and given us glamourous glimpses of the future. They say that the building which sits on its far northern tier, where the unclassifiable project appears to meet its end, was designed by him, and so great is his stature etched on the façade in the vestibule are the words created by Hans Kammler as a gift to his people.
Quite appropriately Hans Kammler got his start as builder, what the Americans would call a real estate developer. For it is creating, making and building that is at the very core of who we are as a people. Born in Stettin in 1901 Kammler served heroically in the Rossbach Freikorps. Studying civil engineering from 1919 to 1923 at the School of Technology in the Free State of Danzig after practical years of local building and housing projects he was awarded a doctorate in Engineering (1932). He joined the Party in 1931, not early enough to have been an old fighter, but early enough to avoid any and all suspicion that he was a March Violet. Indeed, so fanatical was his devotion to ideology that he became something of a fearsome person in some quarters. And except for those who knew him and his unending and undying tenacity his meteoric rise in the apparatus and bureaucracy of the state was truly astounding and startling; it was as if before him lay a carved river which he flowed across in an effortless glide.
Joining the elite SS in 1933 he was soon named head of all aviation building, and soon everyone in this department learned that he was a virtual whirlwind; seemingly never needing to sleep, always being full of bountiful and copious ideas, his brain and his mouth in perfect concert as he spewed forth unrelenting streams and series of ideas upon ideas; indeed, perhaps the story that is most told of him is that in the depths of late 1941 as he was busy making the rounds at 3:30AM he learned of a task that needed to be completed now, and when he learned that the men were sleeping he proceeded to take a machine gun into the dormitory and fired a few well placed rounds in the ceiling to wake them and spur on the work; perhaps a bit eccentric but successful. Indeed, perhaps even more than Heydrich who was a pure administrator, and Speer who was soon seen as an opportunist and bourgeois relic who had neither the heart of the stomach of a true believer, it was Kammler who became preeminent as the ideal German man.
Blindingly intelligent with a heart of stone, with cold blood and a flair for perfection, he was endlessly inventive and tirelessly energetic, and also a true visionary; for him and for the men he trained there was no contradiction between the life and philosophy of blood and soil and the techniques and requirements of a futuristic technological society; that indeed they were hand in glove; for as his speeches now always indicate what man is is a being who can never remain in place but must always evolve and develop; and that no man had such deep reverence for the German land and the German forest and the blue and green earth; indeed he said that technical marvels were the apotheosis of being true to the earth; provided they were respectful of and blended in with the natural landscape and were aesthetically beautiful, so unlike the eyesores and the monstrosities which dotted the American landscape and small towns, cities and suburbs; indeed for him it was techne which was art, and that technology was art and that all of it was the wonderful fruit of the German spirit.
Above all Kammler was an administrator and an organizer. Famously Adolf Hitler was none of these things, his forte was blue sky thinking, and his monologues were such that those who were in his presence learned to commit those words to memory; but it was left to othesr to take the stray vague hint or the occasional clear directive and make them tangible. Kammler he called his “executor” not without a bit of grim humor or course, but it was true, no sooner had Hitler spoken than Kammler had brought it into a palpable reality; he was part of that younger generation of managers, and technocrats and administrators, and systems analysts whose skills were so admired (and sometimes feared) by the Old Fighters. Free to obey was their watchword—free to obey.
They were marvels this cohort, and none so more than Kammler. By the late 1940s he had created a vast network of systems that spanned the continent, and master plans were in place, every last detail on paper before the reality unfolded in the world. They say that in 1943 (so the joke ran) that you could not start a car or turn a screw in the Reich without his signature; but as peace was achieved this no longer became the reality; far from being dictatorial the central tenet of task management (for such was the rubric under which his theory went) was to create independent entities at the level of the department and the worker. In the ecosystem of task management the task manager was to function as the creator of the team and the trainer of the team (or teams) across the spectrum of competencies and functions; the function of the worker will simply be to produce. In the task management system Kammler created anything and everything that hinders training and production is deemed an evil and the job of the task manager is to extirpate them with extreme prejudice. The team must become an unrelenting factory of whatever it is called on to produce, and distractions of all kinds must be totally eliminated. For time as he always said is the essence itself and the task manager protects and husbands it with a ferocity that is feral. Kammler was certainly that: feral But as the Americans are wont to say: nothing succeeds like success or, alternately, the proof is in the pudding.
***
An old story still circulates that when Speer’s father first met Hitler he nearly had a nervous breakdown in his presence (1934) and I do not doubt it. As we all know Hitler had an unerring intuition about people and when he sensed weakness he had a penchant for boring into their souls with his gaze and there is no reason to think that in Herr Speer’s case he did not do just that. The son himself is now in respectable retirement, though we hear that he is ailing. All honor the good things he did but we all know too that in his inner man (the only thing that counts!), in his heart of hearts he was not one of us, not one of the inner magical circle where the spells are cast. The same things goes for Von Braun; in his case so fecund was his brain that we would consult with him before his passing in 1977. But it was a confirmed policy of the Reich that when they had made their signal services to the cause of Volk that we don’t make window into men’s souls. After all it is confirmed wisdom that from time to time the less we say about it the better.
Kammler on the other hand was a fanatic. I see him at symposiums from time to time and at the gatherings; and have had one chance to meet him in a small group. He exudes health and concentration; so focused is he it is as if he is immersed in a perpetual clear state so much so that when he speaks to you it as if the world is bearing down on you; and you know the moment he leaves what he said is the furthest thing from his mind thoughts though, if prompted, he could recall it a moment’s notice; it was this almost unnatural quality that impressed itself on his contemporaries in the 1930s but it was the results that he always attained which led them to be in awe; being plucked out of the section of the garden allotment (as if out of nowhere that his) he went from the Aviation Department to Reich Ministry Of Armaments in V2 underground production; and he began a huge fuel storage facility in Thuringia under the Mittelwerke GmbH.
Kammler became an indispensable figure in the armaments efforts of the SS, so much so, that he was only answerable to Heinrich Himmler himself. Speer made Kammler his representative for special construction tasks, expecting that Kammler would commit himself to working in harmony with the ministry's main construction committee. But in March 1941 Kammler had Goring appoint him as his delegate for special buildings under the fighter aircraft program, which made him one of the war economy's most important managers. In April 1943, Hitler gave Kammler full control over jet-aircraft production which he knew was indispensable to our people becoming a planetary people. It was as if he was moving from portfolio to portfolio but as he is supposed to have always said that when a man begins acting and delves into something so deeply he loses his sense of self there is no telling how much he can accomplish.
But of course his piece de resistance was the postwar building of the crematoria, the so-called assembly lines of death as it came to be known among the wags who not only had seen it all but were men of the world. I can tell you that no mausoleum has ever been such an aesthetic marvel as these facilities, they were spare and sleek and clean and had the hallmark of German efficiency, not a part was wasted and the immaculate white look from the outside gave the idea that some kind of pristine rite was happening in their depths. Once the blue print and models were complete and the load, burn, cool, reload process was in place all of them which dotted the landscape were facsimiles of one another; it was truly his greatest achievement, that is until he ascended to power and drove the project of putting us into space; and if you have never tried to turn some eight million bodies into ash and smoke you have yet to conceptualize the greatness. For what he was above all was a task manager, and Task Management was the title of a pamphlet he wrote in order to inculcate his ethos and broadcast it as widely as possible, and if he ended it in a flourish of rhetoric that is only all to the good for like Hitler himself he was always cool eyed but also man of fire and passion:
The task manager is the life force itself; and, as such, is the future of work. For life is a test but the kind of test it is is a performance test. When an airplane part is created it is immediately subjected to phenomenal pressure of such intensity and force that it exceeds by a factor of a thousand any it will meet in reality. These stress tests perform the salutary function of ascertaining the only thing that matters about the object: if it can pass the test of time, which is the test of performance. Because should that plane go down and the bodies be liquefied in the blast of the impact, no one wants to be the man answerable to that conflagration. Safe to say that the task manager of the future we envision will never be ensnared in such a case but, having exhorted the life force itself in the world of his team, he will glide gracefully and effortlessly through the building as he watches the force he embodies fly smoothly through the air to its known destination of always flying, always sailing, always advancing, always learning, always working, always succeeding — and, what is more and is the most essential thing of all: always living.
Continued at Empyrean (Part Sixteen)
