Gestapo (5 page)

It was an odd partnership: on the one side the Renaissance figure of the supreme Nazi bully, on the other the shady apparition with no roots, who had graduated from one of the extreme right-wing Students' Corps to the Civil Service of the crippled Weimar Republic, which he despised. Brilliant, inordinately ambitious, hag-ridden, Rudolf Diels shows himself as a queer combination of a twilight adventurer, man of affairs (cynical in the German tradition), and intellectual. He is shrewd and yet humorless; highly educated, and yet illiterate when it came to true understanding; a man clever and balanced enough to impress Goering, but sufficiently lacking in judgment to take on the incomparably more able Heydrich in single combat. He is weak enough to need bolstering up with the delusion that his duty lay in serving the Nazis, yet strong enough to fight the S.A. and the S.S. in his own interests with boldness and cunning. He saw in Goering's favor not only a supreme opportunity for advancement, but also the chance to influence the course of German history. In the end he was broken by a stronger and more single-minded power, to which he had to surrender the whole apparatus
of the Gestapo. By that time he had given up fighting and took what offered. Under Goering's protection (for Goering was loyal to his friends) he survived in nominally high positions until, in the end, Himmler caught up with him and he found himself in the basement of the requisitioned art school in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, a prisoner of the organization which, with hopes so high, he himself had founded in the first flush of the Nazi Revolution.

When it was all over he wrote a remarkable book which he called characteristically
Lucifer Ante Portas
, a sustained and closely argued apology for his career in the Gestapo. In it he represents himself as the man who stood between countless innocents and the vicious brutality of the undisciplined brown-shirt mob and the evil fanaticism of the black S.S. In this defense there can be found that golden thread of truth which knits together the really superior lie. Torture in those early days was the perquisite of the S.A. and the S.S., who had restored to Europe on a large and open scale the practice of degrading the spirit by breaking the flesh which for centuries had survived only in a hole-in-corner manner. It was not until later that the house in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse became the chief torture chamber of the Reich; and, although the infant Gestapo made its arrests and handed its victims over to the care of the S.A. concentration camp commanders, it also intervened on occasion to save individuals seized by the S.A. and the S.S. It warned others of imminent danger in time for them to escape. At Christmas, the first Christmas of the new régime, Diels himself was influential in obtaining Goering's amnesty which emptied the camps of many prisoners. In such engagements he quarrelled dangerously with both S.A. and S.S. leaders and frequently irritated Goering in the process—for although Goering resented the power of both organizations and was determined to keep his grip on his own Gestapo, he needed them to batter down the enemies of the régime. This made it difficult for Diels.

What the author of
Lucifer Ante Portas
omits to indicate, however, is that his long and ultimately vain battle with the S.S. and the S.A. was in the main a part of his own struggle for power. He was fighting not for order and justice as such, but for order to be imposed by Rudolf Diels and not by Heinrich Himmler. It is clear, however,
that he was not a natural brute and took no delight in wanton violence. He was not a totally ruthless man like Heydrich, a totally conscienceless stooge like Daluege, a methodical madman like Himmler. If Diels had been able to maintain himself at the head of the Gestapo and defeat the S.S., events in Germany would have taken a milder course. But it is equally clear that he was committed completely to the Nazi revolution and, to retain his own position, was prepared to go along with it while fighting for personal ends the men who were most actively helping to make it. The reader of
Lucifer Ante Portas
, to say nothing of certain evidence at Nuremberg, might gain the impression that the Gestapo in those early days was a sanctuary of justice and a solace for the afflicted. Diels, as the career official, the regular policeman, is represented as standing for order and sanity in a howling wilderness of barbarity. The picture was a good deal less idyllic than that.

Diels was a regular police official. His new master, Goering, had immediately started making clear his attitude towards the regular police, the colleagues of Diels. It was due to the purge of the regular force that Diels got his chance.

Diels was also an opponent of the S.A. and the S.S. His whole defense rests on the plea that only by remaining where he was could he curb the excesses of the S.A. and the S.S. But Goering had not been in office for more than a few days before he issued a directive to the reorganized police which defined them as accomplices of the S.A. and the S.S.:

“The police have at all costs to avoid anything suggestive of hostility to the S.A., S.S. and Stahlhelm, since these organizations contain the most important constructive national elements … it is the business of the police to abet any form of national propaganda.”

Objective justice, on Hitler's specific orders, was defunct. Men, like the young lawyer Heinz Litten, who insisted on defending enemies of the revolution, were taken away and tortured and killed—or driven to kill themselves. Arbitrary violence was to take its place. So Goering continued:

“Police officers who make use of firearms in the
execution of their duties will, without regard to the consequences of such use, benefit by my protection; those who out of a misplaced regard for such consequences fail in their duty will be punished in accordance with the regulations.… Every official must bear in mind that failure to act will be regarded more seriously than an error due to taking action.”

On February 22nd these instructions to the regular police were rendered superfluous. By a special decree Goering added fifty thousand Auxiliary Police to the regular forces, by the simple expedient of issuing white armbands to as many S.A. and S.S. men, arming them, and giving them full police powers.

In March, in a whole series of speeches to mass audiences in the course of the election campaign, he developed his attitude. It was now that he ordered the construction of the first official concentration camp, Oranienburg, at Sachsenhausen outside Berlin, to be run and staffed by the S.A.

“Fellow Germans,” he declared at Frankfurt-am-Main, “my measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don't have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate; nothing more.”

He then proceeded to describe how he intended to carry out this modest mission:

“This struggle will be a struggle against chaos, and I shall not conduct it with the power of any police; a bourgeois state might have done that. Certainly I shall use the power of the State and the Police to the utmost, my dear Communists, so do not draw any false conclusions. But the real struggle to the death, in which my fist will lie heavily on your necks, I shall conduct with those down there—and they are the brownshirts.”

To a mass meeting a few days later in Essen he declared:

“Even if we make many mistakes, at least we shall be acting: I may shoot a little wildly, one way or the other. But at least I shoot.”

And on another occasion:

“Every bullet which leaves the barrel of a police
pistol now is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered: I ordered all this. I back it up. I assume the responsibility, and I am not afraid to do so.”

And lest it should be thought that this was simply bombast, designed to strike terror into the hearts of an audience of sheep and create a general feeling of hopelessness in the hearts of the opposition, here is Goering again, speaking officially as Chief of Police to his own police officers in Berlin. The date is February 20th, seven days before the Reichstag Fire, four days before the police raid on Karl Liebknecht House, the Communist Party H.Q., two days before the enrollment of the S.A. and the S.S. as Auxiliary Police:

“I can do nothing against the Red mob with a police force which is afraid of being punished for doing what is only its duty. The responsibility must be placed squarely where it belongs. It does not lie with the junior official in the street. I want to hammer it home into your heads that the responsibility lies with me alone. You must be quite clear about that. When you shoot, I shoot. When a man lies dead, it I who have shot him, even if I happen to be sitting up there in my office in the Ministry. For it is my responsibility alone.”

Nothing, one would think, could be more unambiguous than that. Goering, as Controller of Police, categorically instructs his police to shoot first and ask questions afterwards, threatens them with punishment if they falter in this duty, and takes upon himself full responsibility for his actions. The thugs of the S.A. and the S.S. are enrolled as policemen, and the S.S. and S.A. as a whole are above the law and enjoy Goering's full protection. Rudolf Diels in his first two months under Goering heard all this, knew all about it, and by April 4th, when he took over the newly founded Gestapo, knew precisely what sort of a man his master was. Diels himself has quoted these passages from Goering's oratory in his own book.

Also, before he took over the Gestapo, he knew what sort of a man Hitler was. He gives us a vivid description of the scene on the balcony of the great hall of the Reichstag with Hitler staring down in silence at the great sea of flame, and then suddenly beginning to rant:

“His face was scarlet with emotion, and with the heat, which, up there in the dome, was intense. He started yelling as though he would burst and with a more total abandonment of self-control than I had ever seen in him before:

“ ‘Now there must be no mercy. Anyone who stands in our way will be trampled underfoot. The German people won't understand mercy. Every Communist official will be shot out of hand. The Communist Deputies must hang this very night.…' ”

If the atmosphere throughout Germany as a whole was dominated by the sudden overflow of pent-up violence, with what remained of the regular forces of law and order struggling to keep their footing and being swept along by the brown flood, inside police headquarters in Berlin there was a mood of sustained and deadly vendetta and limitless intrigue.

One basic fact was that Goering controlled the Prussian Police, and was determined to keep it, and saw in the Gestapo his private instrument. The other basic fact was that outside Berlin, in Munich, Heinrich Himmler, the Chief of the S.S., had been made Chief of Police in Bavaria, and, egged on by his new right hand, Reinhard Heydrich, was determined to become the Police Chief of all Germany.

The almost total destruction of the Gestapo archives makes it impossible to follow in detail the progress of the intrigues which followed from these facts. We need not regret this. Nothing could be more tedious in detail than a consequent narrative of the arid, repetitive moves in any struggle for power. In essence they are limited and restricted in the extreme. They include the double-cross; the playing off of one faction against another; the playing of both ends against the middle; the bluff; the double-bluff. They include blackmail and they include flattery. They include, in a word, all the tricks of self-advancement, old and dreary as the desert hills, but still, in the hands of the master, infallible in their effect. Himmler versus Goering;
Heydrich versus Diels; Gisevius versus Diels and Heydrich (a forlorn hope, if ever there was one); Daluege, cleverer, in spite of looking like an affronted duck and being to all appearances as stupid, floating on the tide and taking advantage of every current; Nebe playing Daluege's game, but, in the end, biting off more than he could chew, and failing to realize that in the last resort the individual must have an ally and that, although a master can play everybody off against everybody else some of the time, he cannot play them all off against each other all the time.

Who were these people, and how did they fit in together? Goering and Diels, Himmler and Heydrich, we have met. Gisevius flickers in and out of this narrative, as he must flicker in and out of all narratives concerned with the development of Hitler's tyranny and the pathetic, broken-backed resistance to it, not because he was in the least important but because he thought he was important and sometimes managed to impose himself on others. He was able to do this because he was a born go-between and, by German standards, an accomplished intriguer.

He appears on the scene as a very young man brought into the Prussian Ministry of the Interior by one of Goering's nominees, Under-Secretary Grauert. That was in July, 1933, three months after Diels had installed the new Gestapo in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse. He was a young lawyer on the make, who had decided that the Nazified Civil Service offered the best chances. With a complaisant and idle Minister in times of comparative stability he would have gone far. But he arrived on the scene at a time of revolution, when the negative and colorless were being swept away by the unscrupulous and the dynamic. He did not grasp his own limitations: bumptious, tactless, unsnubbable, yet sly, not at all a brute, but a place-man who would do anything required of him to hold his place, he was lucky never to get one. He is alive today, and he owes his life to Heydrich. But for Heydrich he might have intrigued Diels out of existence and risen high in the Gestapo. He would then have been doomed to ruination, instead of being fêted as a star witness for the prosecution. For he might not have found it desirable to make common cause with the men who were ineffectually plotting Hitler's death.

Daluege was Himmler's man, placed by him in Berlin to represent the spearhead of the S.S. penetration of the police. In time he came to command the
Ordnungspolizei
, or uniformed police, and, as such, was responsible for many of the most dreadful crimes loosely attributed to the Gestapo. We shall meet him later on. His cleverness seems to have been confined to a highly developed instinct for self-preservation, which, however, proved in the end inadequate, and he was hanged in Prague in 1946. In those early days in Berlin he pinned his faith to Himmler and kept fairly quiet. Throughout his dreary little career (he was only forty when he was executed) he seems never to have taken a decision of his own but always to have acted as the literal-minded and joyless administrator of the death and torture sanctioned by his superiors.