Gestapo (3 page)

At the trial of the doctors at Nuremberg nobody managed to sort out the question of complicity in these experiments. Goering and high-ranking officers in the Air Ministry were all involved. Respectable members of the German medical profession as well as cranks and scallywags had guilty knowledge. But the driving force was
Himmler—Himmler the scientist
manqué
, the collector of the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars. And we find him breaking out petulantly against what he called “Christian medical circles” who tried to obstruct him in his starry-eyed role as protector of science and seeker after truth.

There was also Himmler the crusader and visionary, the man who built a romantic castle in a German forest where the knights of the S.S., many of whom could hardly read or write, were required to repair at intervals to contemplate the glory of their order and establish spiritual contact with the heroes of medieval Germany. We see the crusader in action in the notorious speech of October 4th, 1943, to his S.S. Generals at Posen:

“One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the S.S. men. We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else. What happens to a Russian and a Czech does not interest me in the least. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture: otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless where it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes up to me and says, ‘I cannot dig the antitank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman, for it would kill them,' then I have to say, ‘You are the murderer of your own blood, because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood.…' Our concern, our duty, is our people and
our blood. We can be indifferent to everything else. I wish the S.S. to adopt this attitude towards the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians.…”

The S.S. did.

And again, referring to the massacres of Jews:

“Most of
you
know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out, and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written.… We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.”

This was the tone set by Himmler for all the organizations under his command, including the Gestapo and the S.D. They obeyed it in the spirit and in the letter. Himmler was mad; but not all his many tens of thousands of subordinates were mad. Numbers of these to this day, still sane, hold responsible positions throughout the two Germanys.

There was also Himmler the animal lover. We glimpse him in the Posen speech. Here he is again, in conversation with his masseur, Felix Kersten, of whom he made a confidant and who was able, in this commanding position, to save the lives of some who would have been put to death. According to Kersten, Himmler used to condemn all blood-sports as “cold-blooded murder of innocent and defenseless animals.” And he would fulminate against Goering, the huntsman (another animal lover):

“Goering, that damned bloodhound, kills every animal he can shoot. Imagine, Herr Kersten, some poor deer is grazing peacefully, and up comes the hunter with his gun to shoot that poor animal.… Could that give you pleasure, Herr Kersten?”

Himmler did not like blood at all; but he had his duty to do, and he did it unflinchingly. When he addressed his S.S. Generals at Posen referring to the terrible sights they had all seen, the spectacle of hundreds of men, women, and children lying side by side at the bottom
of the trench they had been forced to dig with their own hands, and congratulated them on sticking it out, he was proudly speaking as one of them. Although his preoccupation with headquarters business made it unnecessary for him to be present at the massacres he was compelled to order, he was not one to ask others to do what he would not do himself; and in the very early days of the Russian campaign, in August, 1941, at Minsk, visiting one of Heydrich's Action Groups (it was the one, incidentally, commanded by Artur Nebe, the friend of Hans Bernd Gisevius, whom we shall shortly encounter), he ordered Nebe to bring out a hundred prisoners for a sample execution in his presence. S.S. Lieutenant General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Higher S.S. and Police Leader for the Central Russian front, was also there. In an affidavit he described how he watched Himmler closely and saw him stagger at the first volley and almost fall to the ground in a faint. When the execution squad failed to kill two Jewish women outright Himmler could not control himself and cried out—so that afterwards Bach-Zelewski had to reproach his chief for upsetting the firing squad and ruining its nerve. But, althought upset, Himmler, like his generals, had stuck it out. This was Himmler the hero and stoic.

Himmler was also interested in power. Many people have queried Himmler's capacity, unable to believe that a man so colorless and dreary should have either the will or the strength for power. It is also pointed out that for many years he was Hitler's most devoted slave. But while some men are born to achieve power, others develop the taste for it as it is thrust upon them. It is improbable that Himmler, as a chicken farmer, dreamed of ruling Germany—as Hitler in his equal obscurity most certainly dreamed. It is improbable that when he took over the S.S. with its membership of three hundred professional thugs he saw in this modest institution the future janissaries of the New Order. It is improbable that when he created the Waffen S.S. to fight with the Reichswehr that he looked forward to the day when he would be virtual commander-in-chief under Hitler. But quite early in his political career he must have discovered that he was a born administrator with a marked capacity for intrigue.

He was, in fact, one of those intriguers, not energetic and demonstrative, who, with a fixed idea, are ready to let affairs take their course until the moment to strike presents itself. In his later years he let many things take their course, including an active conspiracy against Hitler conducted in part by his own subordinates. He profited by them invariably, until the very end, when, as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Armies, he sought to assume the leadership of the Reich and make peace with the Western Allies. Then Hitler in his Bunker in Berlin, discovering the treachery of
treuer Heinrich
, finally broke him, as his last act. Then, too, Himmler rounded off his character, which had no center, by regarding himself unquestioningly and in all innocence as the sort of man the Western Allies would be prepared to do a deal with.

As for his physicial appearance, it is familiar enough from photographs. It gave him great pain because it accorded so ill with the standard laid down for the knights of the S.S. But he had to put up with it; and, indeed, it served him well. It served others well, too. With very few exceptions surviving members of the S.S. have expressed pained surprise that Himmler should have done such terrible things. He was so benevolent, so diffident, so mild. They simply had no idea … though what passed through their minds when this old woman of a man spoke to them coldly of mass destruction, as at Posen, is not recorded. The best contemporary description so far comes from Major General Walter Dornberger, who did not belong to the S.S. but was responsible for the development of the V-2 at Peenemuende. Himmler visited the station, and afterwards made himself a great trouble:

“He looked to me like an intelligent elementary school-teacher, certainly not a man of violence. I could not for the life of me see anything outstanding or extraordinary about this middle-sized, youthfully slender man in gray S.S. uniform. Under a brow of average height two gray-blue eyes looked out at me, behind glittering pince-nez, with an air of peaceful interrogation. The trimmed moustache below the straight, well-shaped nose traced a dark line on his unhealthy, pale features. The lips were colorless and very thin. Only the inconspicuous, receding chin surprised me. The skin of
his neck was flaccid and wrinkled. With a broadening of his constant, set smile, faintly mocking and sometimes contemptuous about the corners of the mouth, two rows of excellent white teeth appeared between the thin lips. His slender, pale, and almost girlishly soft hands, covered with blue veins, lay motionless on the table throughout our conversation.”

Willy hoettl, alias Walter Hagen, an intelligent but rather prolix Lieutenant Colonel in the S.D., a prosecution witness at Nuremberg, and the author of a book on the German Secret Service, has contributed largely to the confused impression of Himmler by attributing all his remarkable achievements to Reinhard Heydrich. He makes the common mistake of confusing power with dynamism.

Dynamism Heydrich had in plenty. It is scarcely open to doubt that he used Himmler's inoffensive person and hesitant ways as a camouflage for his own highly purposeful activities. It is still less open to doubt that Himmler frequently used Heydrich when Heydrich thought he was using Himmler. This is not to say that superficially at least Heydrich was not a stronger man than Himmler, or that he did not conceive highly dangerous ambitions sooner than Himmler. But it is permissible to doubt very strongly indeed the assumption so often canvassed by surviving members of the S.S. that Heydrich, had he lived, would have one day become the new German Fuehrer. He would certainly have tried it on. But Himmler would as certainly have seen to it that before he succeeded he would have broken his neck.

The only thing interesting about Heydrich was the extreme to which he carried certain traits widely admired in Germany, when presented with some moderation, but not attractive to others. He was very young, very handsome, save that his eyes were too close-set; an outstanding example of that blond mixture of effeminacy and toughness which may be observed in any Teutonic night club. He had immense drive, which was liable to carry him too far;
total ruthlessness in the attainment of his own ends, which were wrapped up in personal ambition; no active enjoyment of cruelty except sometimes, perhaps, almost as an afterthought; and a devilish sense of humour. Vain as a peacock, but mockingly aware of his own vanity, clever, perhaps too clever by half, and contemptuous of the clumsiness of most of his colleagues and superiors, he nevertheless could be clumsy in his use of force and, unlike Himmler, was liable to overreach himself. He was dynamite, like a character in an American gangster story; and in the S.S. he was able to canalize his nihilism into a constructive purpose.

He had started life as a naval officer and, at the age of twenty-six, with a promising career before him, was cashiered by Admiral Raeder for getting the daughter of a dockyard superintendent into trouble and taking an unusually independent line about it. The girl was his official fiancée, but he had had enough of her and told her outraged father that the engagement was off: no self-respecting Naval officer, he pointed out, could conceivably marry a girl who was prepared to give herself away so easily. Plenty of cads, however, have lived and died without becoming mass executioners; and this disreputable incident in Heydrich's life seems to be made too much of by German writers as a formative incident. It is rather a typical incident in a character already formed.

Certainly Heydrich was surprised, angry, and disgruntled when he found himself out of a job and with a broken career. Certainly this drove him earlier than otherwise into that haven of the resentful and disgruntled, the infant S.S. Certainly it was in the Hamburg branch headquarters that Himmler found him, his attention having been directed to the enlistment of a new member who had been an officer if not a gentleman and who knew how to read and write—who had, moreover, been employed in Naval Intelligence. Certainly, sensing which way the tide was running, and observing that Himmler's preoccupation with racial purity, at least as regards physical appearance, was filling the S.S. with a remarkable collection of fair-haired morons, Heydrich saw his opportunity. But he had the ability as well. And he was one of those very few born leaders who have the boldness and the confidence to surround
themselves not with sycophants but with the cleverest men they can find.

Himmler took him to Munich and confided to him a pet project. The S.S. was all very well as a
corps d'élite
of guards; but it needed to be more than that. If the S.S. was to be the fountainhead of German manhood it had to impose itself as a minority power on the sprawling, brawling shape of revolutionary Germany. It needed a highly organized intelligence system, and Reinhard Heydrich was the obvious man to create it. Heydrich thought so too.

He took his new assignment in a very broad sense. The drilling and recruitment of the S.S. could be left to those who liked that sort of thing. He would provide its brains. He decided quite soon that it was easier to turn brilliant young men after his own heart into useful S.S. officers by offering them careers which they could not hope to make elsewhere, than to turn the existing membership of the S.S. into brilliant young men with the brains and character to carry out the tasks envisaged for them. So he proceeded to build up a
corps d'élite
within the S.S., just as Himmler was already building up the S.S. as a
corps d'élite
within the S.A. The basis of this body was known as the S.S.
Sicherheitsdienst
, or Security Service, called hereafter by its initials the S.D. And to the end of its history the S.D. remained a purely S.S. organization, playing no official part in the apparatus of State, although, when Himmler took over the Prussian Gestapo (not as leader of the S.S., but as a police officer under Goering), the S.D. became in theory the long arm, or intelligence service, of the Gestapo, and later became inextricably merged with it.