Gestapo (4 page)

The two men, Himmler and Heydrich, made indeed a terrible combination. With the advent of Hitler to power and his immediate domination of Prussia they represented the strength of the Nazi movement in Bavaria, and with their rapidly developing organization played a major part in carrying out the
coup d'état
after the March elections which secured Munich for Hitler. During those two months neither Himmler nor Heydrich had official Government standing: their sole authority was the power of the S.S. Nor was Himmler, much less Heydrich, his very young lieutenant, a member of the inner Nazi circle. He had no pretensions to high office. And, indeed, when the Bavarian
Government was overthrown, Himmler contented himself with asking for the post of Chief of Police in Munich, which he received.

We shall probably never know whether it was Himmler or Heydrich who hit on the idea of getting control of the police, first of Bavaria, then of all Germany. Himmler himself was so preoccupied with the organization and recruitment of the S.S. and his dreams for a knightly order that it was probably Heydrich, restless and thrusting. But Himmler had thoughts of his own. His administrative skill and his romantic visions dwelt in rigorously separated compartments, and he was never blinded by passion in the conduct of his intrigues. Heydrich, although he prided himself on his superior finesse and flexibility and despised the idiocies of his master, was nevertheless very much at the mercy of his own destructive impulses. We shall see how he was to drive with all his power at the final centralization of his authority under Himmler; and we shall see how Himmler profited by this to the extent of allowing Heydrich to build up what was virtually a State within a State—within which, nevertheless (and here, I think, is the real significance of the odd and anomalous relationship of the Gestapo and the S.D.), Himmler kept certain features fluid. We shall also see how when Heydrich was killed in 1942 by Czech patriots Himmler hesitated some months before appointing a successor; and then he chose a man of very different stamp from Heydrich: the Austrian lawyer, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. This is generally taken to indicate that Himmler had come to fear Heydrich and was happier to replace him with a lesser man, lacking in vaulting ambition.

It seems more likely that Heydrich had served his purpose by building up under Himmler's eye the immense apparatus which was now running smoothly. For Heydrich was not the only dangerous man whom Himmler allowed and encouraged to play a dangerous game. At the very end of the war, when Himmler was at last deciding to commit himself to the bid for supreme power and a deal with the Allies, he “allowed himself to be persuaded” by one of the late Heydrich's most gifted discoveries, Schellenberg, who started life in the foreign intelligence section of the S.D. and later came to control the unified intelligence service of the Reich, to treat with Count Folke Bernadotte.
One of Himmler's qualities which struck all beholders was his extreme caution and slowness in action. It seems likely, however, that he understood the desirability of swiftness and boldness as much as anybody else, but preferred to cover himself until success had been attained by allowing his subordinates, who could always be thrown over in a crisis, to indulge in the swiftness and the boldness.

Certainly nobody who had not realized for himself the overriding importance of police activity in the new Germany could have set about the methodical conquest of police power with such steadiness of aim and sureness of foot. It could not all be done by Heydrich. One of the men Himmler had to conquer was Goering himself, who, those early days, was scarcely aware of the existence of Heydrich. The younger man may well have counseled and prompted; but when it came to action it was Himmler who had to meet Hitler and Goering face to face and make good his case—or rather his two cases: for Hitler he had one story, for Goering another. And he could not do this without knowing exactly what he was doing, and why. Anybody in a subordinate position who has ever tried to brief a superior officer to fight a battle with his equals on a matter which he does not understand will realize the truth of this.

The battle for the Gestapo began even before Himmler took over the Bavarian Police in April, 1933. At first it was a long-range battle. By the time Hitler became Chancellor, Himmler and Heydrich between them had raised the number of the S.S. to fifty thousand, and the organization was very strongly officered. Himmler himself was known as the Reichsfuehrer S.S. (RFSS). Beneath him there tailed away a complete quasi-military hierarchy, from generals to privates, known by the terms invented for the S.A., of which the S.S. was still on paper a part.
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It had been Heydrich's idea to recruit in addition to the open
membership a shadow corps of S.S. officers who were to keep their affiliations secret until the Nazis came to power. Thus, in key positions all over Germany, including Government offices in which membership of any Party was forbidden, there were high-ranking S.S. officers waiting for the moment to reveal themselves and put on the black uniforms they had never worn. The regular police forces of the Reich had their quota of these, a striking example being Artur Nebe of the Prussian Criminal Police or Kripo, a sort of C.I.D., who will become a familiar apparition in these pages. It was the infiltration technique which has now become notorious in another context. The fifth column did not begin in Spain: it began in Germany under the Weimar Republic. The Nazis began their career of treachery not against foreign states but against their own.

When on January 30th, 1933, the ancient and decrepit Hindenburg crowned his postwar career of ineptitude and deceit by inviting Hitler to become Chancellor of Germany, he committed to the care of the Nazis the whole State apparatus of a system they despised. For the moment Hitler had to accept what was called a coalition, which meant that important offices were filled by men he proposed to get rid of at the first opportunity. For instance, von Papen, not a Nazi, who by his own
coup d'état
of the year before had shaken the inadequate foundations of the Federal Republic, became Vice-Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. But Hitler was able to make certain key appointments, and the most critical of these was the elevation of Goering to be Prussian Minister of the Interior, with control of the Prussian police. Goering, of course, did not report to von Papen, who was his technical superior: at that time, with Goebbels, he was closer to Hitler than any other man, and more than any other man he had the responsibility of carrying out the Nazi revolution, which could not begin until Hitler had achieved power by constitutional means.

With the war between us and the early ‘thirties it may seem odd to think of the blusterer who was going to smash Britain with his Air Force as a revolutionary; but, indeed, Goering was precisely that. He was, in spite of soft living and expensive habits, a man of immense energy and drive. His vicious temper and his appetite for pleasure, his hatred
of his enemies and his generosity to his friends, were all equally unbridled. This ex-fighter pilot of the First World War, gross, debauched, yet physically very brave, a buccaneer by nature, had developed a mystique of loyalty: he demanded it, he gave it. He became a revolutionary because he wanted power and riches, to play the despotic patron as well as to destroy—unlike Goebbels, who was a revolutionary because he hated others having power and riches. When he had achieved both, and allowed himself to believe that the war was won, he ceased to be a revolutionary and became a conservative. It was only then that he took to wearing snow-white togas and jeweled headdresses.

In 1933 he was a savage driver. He enjoyed his own savagery so much, and could be such a good companion on occasion, that it seemed almost a shame when people with less zest for living objected to his activities as the chief policeman of Prussia. But there was a great deal to object to. And the savagery was deepseated. He showed it to the whole world for the first time during the Reichstag Fire Trial; when he could not contain himself, and roared apoplectic threats across the court at Dimitrov, then an admired and pitied figure, who was later to become a dictator himself and to end his days in Moscow. And Goering retained his savagery to the end. In the closing stages of the war he was talking to Ciano in Berlin: Greece was starving.

“We cannot worry unduly about the hunger of the Greeks. It is a misfortune which will strike many other peoples beside them. In the camps for Russian prisoners they have begun to eat each other. This year between twenty and thirty million people will die of hunger in Russia. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be done about it. It is obvious that if humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples.”

He retained his savagery. But he also retained something of an individual charm which was the undoing of many—of people as far apart as Sir Nevile Henderson, His Majesty's Ambassador to Berlin, and Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo under Goering. Even in Ciano's report
of that terrible conversation there is something of the Goering which made able strangers lose their judgment. Hitler, Himmler, and others had been saying the same thing, but flatly, defiantly, and without a shadow of irony or philosophic doubt. In Goering's tones there is just such a shadow. He was a complex villain if ever there was one. He also kept his bravery to the end and made a showing at Nuremberg which shamed his colleagues. He also kept his stubborn cunning, defeating the hangman.

All these attributes have tended to obscure the simple fact that in the early days of the Nazi revolution Hitler relied on Goering's savagery to beat down the opposition ruthlessly. And Goering did what was required of him. The role of Goering himself, as controller of the Prussian police, is as clear as daylight. The role of the Gestapo, of which he was nominal head, and which he created, is far less clear. The main evidence concerning its first activities derives from two sources, from two men who detested each other and contradict each other at every turn. Rudolf Diels, who actually started the Gestapo under Goering and ran it for a year, and Hans Bernd Gisevius, who vainly aspired to the job and turned his defeat to advantage.

The S.A., the Storm Troopers, the louts in brown shirts and jackboots who had roared and bullied their way to power, expected blood when their Fuehrer was translated, and they were determined to have it. They had the freedom of the streets and beat up or kicked to death in their improvised “bunkers” anyone they took a dislike to. Their chief enemies were the Communists, who, at the last election, had voted nearly six million strong; but anybody with either a liberal or a Marxist attitude was their predestined victim; and soon they had seized so many that they improvised special holding centers where they could torture their prisoners to their hearts' content.

The man who first thought of this idea was Karl Heines, the S.A. chieftain of Dresden, who put up a barbed-wire stockade for his captives; but soon there were others. And in March, 1933, the idea of the concentration camp was officially blessed, and Oranienburg was set up by Goering himself just outside Berlin and staffed by the S.A.

The S.S. kept a little aloof from the crudest of the street bullying. They had their own self-consciously superior
code. Apart from the higher eadership, they were racially pure and looked like a set of blond Commandos; they had their rigidly idiotic marriage rules, laid down by Himmler, who himself died in doubt about his own ancestry; they had their motto: My Honor is Loyalty. They also had their own select torture chamber in the Columbia House.

The regular police, as such, took little part in these activities; but, then, the regular police had taken little part in anything very much for some years past. Following the lead of the democratic politicians, they had virtually abdicated, while retaining their nominal positions; and the various private armies brawled and killed at will, while they stood by: they stood by most steadfastly when the Nazis were winning. “Parliamentarianism is not sick because it is threatened by dictators; it is threatened by dictators because Parliament has abdicated,” said Chancellor Wirth in the Reichstag three years before Hitler came to power. And this was a true verdict. There were many in the Government offices who were appalled at the prospect of Nazi rule, and had everything to lose by it; but they had done nothing to prevent its coming, and so were disarmed when it came. The same might be said of the police: “The police are not abject because they are threatened by Himmler; they are threatened by Himmler because they are abject.”

Goering, when on January 31st he strode in high spirits into his new office in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, was bent on a purge of the police, and not so much because the police were anti-Nazi as because they were no good. As Chief of the Prussian Police, responsible to him as Minister of the Interior, he appointed the young S.S. General Kurt Daluege, then twenty-nine years old, blond and crass, recommended by Himmler as Chief of the S.S., and cast by him to be the spearhead of his projected advance on Berlin. But Goering had no idea of letting the S.S. come between him and his own personal aims. He needed a small, compact apparatus of his own. He needed his own man, not too scrupulous, who knew his way about the files of the pre-Hitler police, files which contained confidential information not only about the political enemies of the Nazis, but also about the leading Nazis themselves, Goering's colleagues and rivals; he needed, moreover, a man
who, with the authority of the State Police, could put pressure where pressure might be required in his, Goering's, own material interests. He needed, in a word, an instrument of blackmail.

Thus it was that one of the few regular officials he spared was Rudolf Diels, then thirty-three, an up-and-coming careerist (not a secret Nazi: Diels was not the sort of man to commit himself to any cause until it had clearly won), who had been specializing in anti-Communism in the Political Department. He had met Diels before in circumstances which are still obscure, and now decided that he was the very man to act as his personal combination of spy, blackmailer, and bulldog. The arrangement worked so well that after two months, and when Hitler had won his election, Goering decided to detach Diels' office from its proper home as a branch of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and set it up in a headquarters of its own, where it would be free from interference by Himmler's S.S. henchmen. Thus Department IA of the Prussian Political police became the Gestapo, with Rudolf Diels as its first head, under Goering.