Gestapo (27 page)

We all have citizens who, given the necessary power and a total absence of restraint, would behave like S.S. Captain Kramer, “the Beast of Belsen.” But do we all have citizens who, in given circumstances, would behave, precisely, like Otto Ohlendorf? And do the rest of us have as many citizens liable, at the drop of the hat, to turn into Kramers? And would so many of us, again in the requisite circumstances, condone such behavior?

The elementary approach to the German problem fixes on the tradition of absolute obedience to authority which is drummed into every German from childhood on. This is the approach of simple men like Captain Best, who managed to hold his own for the duration of the war in various concentration camps, and it is shared by trained psychiatrists like Elie Cohen, the Dutch author of
Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp
, who managed to survive Auschwitz, although his wife and children were murdered there. This system, in which mother and children are brought up to fear the father; in which schoolchildren are brought up to fear the teacher; in which “every German is there to be kicked by another German, and has, below him, another German to kick,” has, without any doubt, a strong bearing on the mentality which expresses itself over and over again in the shrugging phrase,
Befehl ist Befehl—
“Orders are orders.” But it seems to raise as many questions as it answers.

Professor Cohen has committed himself to the belief that:

“If Netherlanders and Germans were reared from their birth in the same social atmosphere (family, school, youth clubs included), then I believe the differences which are now noticeable between the two peoples would cease to be so. In my view it is not the German as such, but the German individual
malformed
through his German education, that is the determining factor in the behavior of the German people.”

This raises the question: what is it in the Germans that conditions their educational system so disastrously?

Dr. Karl Jaspers, one of the few Germans who has
speculated freely on the question of Germany's guilt, takes the matter a stage further:

“Orders are orders!—this meant and still means emotionally for many people the expression of their supreme duty. But this phrase implied at the same time a shedding of responsibility, when it allowed a man to accept with a shrug everything that was evil and foolish. This behavior under the inner compulsion of obedience became altogether sinful in the moral sense, this instinctive behavior which pretended to itself to be listening to the voice of conscience, whereas in fact it had entirely done with listening to this voice.”

This would seem to take us quite a long way if the Germans had shown themselves content to leave it at that. But they did not.

When General Beck was trying to gather round him a powerful opposition to Hitler he was met on every side by his colleagues, who respected him, with the unassailable response that they had taken their military oath to Hitler and must abide by it or lose their honor. But at Nuremberg general after general exhibited the greatest anxiety to prove that he, personally, had disapproved of such and such an order and had in fact ignored it, or omitted to pass it on. This applied particularly to the notorious Commissar Order in the East and the Commando Order in the West. There were, indeed, many examples of disobedience in the field.

The Germans, however, cannot have it both ways. Either the idea of disobeying an order was inconceivable to them, as asserted by characters as disparate as Keitel, Ohlendorf, and Hoess, or it was not. If it in fact was inconceivable, then it follows that all the actions described in this narrative may be ascribed to that one inhibition. But indeed it was by no means inconceivable, at least as far as the high-ranking officers of the Army, as well as of the S.S., were concerned. It has been demonstrated beyond all possible doubt that they were prepared to disobey the Fuehrer on a truly remarkable scale when it seemed to them, individually, desirable, convenient, and expedient to do so. When it did not, they took refuge in the mystique of total obedience.

Nowhere is this brought out in a more striking way than in the long, tortuous, and broken-backed history of the plots against Hitler's person. From 1938 until the end there
was not a moment when some generals were not actively considering the removal of Hitler, by arrest or assassination, first in order to prevent him from declaring war, then in order to substitute another régime for the purpose of negotiating peace with the Allies. This long-drawn-out procession of unhappy conjunctures has received elaborate and illuminating treatment by Wheeler-Bennett in
The Nemesis of Power
. It is a history not of honor but of dishonor. Time and time again when the Generals felt that Hitler was leading them to disaster, a quite astonishing proportion of them were ready to discuss with the few steadfast and single-minded conspirators ways and means of getting rid of their Fuehrer. Time and time again, when Hitler seemed to be winning, these same individuals remembered their oath of allegiance. Towards the end, when it was clear to all but the lunatic fringe that defeat was certain, and when more and more members of the Officer Corps felt nothing but bitterness against the Leadership, their waverings became squalid in the extreme. Now they invoked their honor as soldiers not for the sake of Germany but for the sake of their own individual skins. Each was afraid that if something went wrong he, General X, might have to sacrifice himself. This was too much to ask. The upstart Keitel had started the rot with his betrayal of his father-in-law in 1938—the poor, wretched Field Marshal von Blomberg, who had married a whore. The rest of the marshals and generals, with a handful of splendid exceptions, thankfully took their tone from Keitel, whom they all so heartily despised.

In the late summer of 1943 there was a remarkable episode involving General von Bock, who had once been disgraced by the Fuehrer as a scapegoat for his, the Fuehrer's, own errors in Russia, but was now back in command on the Southern Russian Front. Then, nearly a year before the maturing of the Beck-Goerderler-Stauffenberg plot, the deeply wronged Marshal was approached by the conspirators, who needed his help. Von Bock knew that the game was up. He knew that Hitler was driving Germany to ruin. He knew that only the removal of Hitler could save his country from total destruction. Things were so bad that he did not even bother to remember his oath of allegiance. Instead he declared categorically that he
would have no part in any
Putsch
which was not supported by Himmler and the S.S. It was June 30th, 1934, all over again. Yet, so desperate were some of the conspirators (but not Beck and Goerderler) that they made an approach to Himmler, who let it be understood that he was not averse to a change in the Leadership.

Again, there was the episode of Field Marshal von Kluge, who also weighed his chances. Von Kluge was one of those who were supposed to loathe the Gestapo and all its works. He was also one of those who for many months fluctuated in agonized indecision when invited to take part in the rescue of Germany from Hitler. His oath did not come into it either. He agreed that he would join in a
Putsch
with all his forces once Hitler was dead. He was then Commander-in-Chief West, trying to cope with the Normandy invasion. And, on July 20th, 1944, there was a moment when it was believed by the conspirators, grouped round Field-Marshal Beck, that the Fuehrer really was dead—killed at his field headquarters by Stauffenberg's bomb.

Von Stuelpnagel, the Military Governor of France, was one of the stalwarts of the conspiracy. Before he could take action in Paris he heard the disastrous news that the bomb attempt had failed and that Hitler was still alive; but he realized that even though the plans for the Berlin
Putsch
might be ruined, a revolt of the Army in France could save the day. So he acted, relying on von Kluge, faced with
a fait accompli
, to back him up. He acted so successfully that in no time at all he had the whole nest of the Security Police under lock and key; our old friends Higher S.S. and Police Leader Oberg, S.S. Colonel Knochen, Captain Roethke and all, found themselves, a little dazed, under arrest in Frêsnes prison. And there they should have stayed, and would have stayed, but for the gallant and high and mighty Commander-in-Chief West, who, when he heard that Hitler was not after all dead, rang up Keitel and allowed himself to be persuaded. Not because of his oath of allegiance. Not because of his soldierly honor, but in spite of it. Simply because he was afraid of what might happen to him if, by some miracle, the Fuehrer should survive a revolt of the Western armies. So von Kluge let the Gestapo out of prison and allowed it to arrest his old comrade von Stuelpnagel and hang him in Berlin.

It is against this sort of background that we have to consider the parrot-cry that for a German officer the idea of disobeying an order was inconceivable.

And it is against the background of highly involuted intrigue within the orbit of Himmler himself that we have to consider the obedience fetish of the R.S.H.A.

When Himmler was approached by one section of the standing conspiracy on the insistence of von Bock, he encouraged his old friend and confidential adviser, Dr. Karl Langbehn, to go to Switzerland to see how the land lay. Langbehn had already been there for the same reasons under the protection of the S.D. in 1942—probably at the instance of Schellenberg. But this time things went wrong. It looked for a moment as though Himmler himself was fatally compromised, and Schellenberg and Mueller, both bearing the motto “My Honor is Loyalty” on their S.S. belts, got together to exploit the seeming peril of their
Reichsfuehrer
in the interests of their personal ambitions. Himmler, however, was far too clever for them all. For an ex-agriculturalist he had a remarkable capacity for playing both ends against the middle without appearing to take the initiative or, indeed, to exert himself at all. He explained everything to the satisfaction of Hitler, had his old friend Langbehn put in a concentration camp, and later tortured and hanged, continued to employ Schellenberg and Mueller, and went on being
treuer Heinrich
. It was a virtuoso performance, the details of which are still obscure; and this performance in itself was enough to make nonsense of the theory that Himmler was a mediocrity upheld by his brilliant subordinates.

Later on, of course, at the end, Himmler came out into the open and, egged on again by Schellenberg (or, perhaps, allowing it to appear that Schellenberg was the active agent), amiably discussed with Count Folke Bernadotte the question of throwing Hitler over—while Kaltenbrunner, with his own plot on hand in Switzerland, did his gloomy best to upset the negotiations. Even Ohlendorf, the paragon, the most rigid of all the upholders of the claim that disobedience was unthinkable, was found trying to persuade Himmler to negotiate a peace behind the Fuehrer's back—in order to prove to the Allies that the S.S. had been an admirable body of men.…

So much for honor, loyalty, and obedience. There remains the problem of subhumanity.

We remember the old
Junker
officer, turned S.S. man and Higher S.S. and Police Leader, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, whose task it was, in the course of partisan warfare, to wipe out as many Russians, men, women, and children, as he could—and by whatever means. We remember his observation at Nuremberg: “If for years, for decades, a doctrine is preached to the effect that the Slav race is an inferior race, that the Jews are not even human beings, then an explosion of this sort is inevitable.”

Von dem Bach-Zelewski was speaking then not only of the extermination of the Jews by the
Einsatzgruppen
of the Security Police and S.D., and in the gas chambers of Wirth and Hoess and Eichmann; he was speaking also of the wholesale massacre of the population of the Soviet Union by units and formations of all kinds, and particularly those employed by him as Chief of Anti-partisan Operations—the massacre, that is to say, which Himmler had in mind when, in his speech at Weselsburg, he dwelt on the necessity of reducing by some thirty million souls the population of the Soviet Union.

It is true that the doctrine of the inferiority and subhumanness of the Slavs and the Jews was actively preached, by Hitler himself and by the schoolmasters of the Reich. We remember Himmler's own comparison of the action against the Jews with a delousing operation carried out in the interests of national hygiene. We remember Dr. Hirt's memorandum about the skulls of his “Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars—the prototype of the repulsive subhuman.” But this doctrine had not been preached by anybody in authority “for decades.” Only twelve years had gone by since Hitler's accession to power. He had begun to preach the doctrine as a dubious character in the wilderness, and the German people had lifted him to power, doctrine and all.

Furthermore, it is clear that, apart from a few psychopaths, the Germans, even the Germans of the S.S., were never able to sink themselves into such a state of mind that they were totally oblivious of the human qualities of Jews and Russians. Those most concerned with their organized slaughter were always most acutely aware, and showed it by their actions, that what they were doing was morally
wrong. Even Eichmann, who gloried in his killings and exaggerated them to his colleagues, took the greatest care never to commit himself on paper. We have the evidence of his colleague in murder, Dieter Wisliceny:

“Eichmann was in every respect a painstaking bureaucrat. He at once recorded in the files every discussion he ever had with any of his superiors. He always told me that the most important thing was to be covered at all times by one's superiors. He shunned all personal responsibility and took care to shelter behind his superiors—in this case Mueller and Kaltenbrunner—and to inveigle them into accepting liability for his actions.”

This description of Eichmann's methods is evidently true; but the diagnosis was not true; Eichmann was not a born bureaucrat. We find a clear picture of his mind in the record of a telephone conversation between him and Roethke, his Paris representative, dated July 14th, 1942. Roethke had been having very serious trouble with the French authorities, who were refusing to give up Jews with French citizenship, and agreeing only to hand over stateless Jews. This led to the unheard of cancellation of one of Eichmann's trains: