Gestapo (8 page)

And so the new phase began. The Communists were proscribed. And by a judicious mixture of blatant force
and flattery of the aged President and the Nationalists, Hitler managed to pass by constitutional means (a majority of two-thirds), on March 21st, 1933, a law which in effect did away with the Constitution. This was the basic Enabling Act (Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich) which gave the Government power for four years to enact laws without the co-operation of the Reichstag, to deviate from the Constitution. It gave the Chancellor personally the power to draft such laws, to come into effect the day after publication.

The Revolution had now started in earnest. It was called the
Gleichschaltung
, the process of bringing the totality of German society under direct Nazi control. First Hitler had to do for the various
Laender
what Goering had done for Prussia. On March 9th, aided by Himmler and Heydrich, Ritter von Epp, on instructions from Berlin, carried out a
Putsch
against the Bavarian Government—and Himmler became Chief of Bavarian Police. A few days later Frick, at the Reichs Ministry of the Interior, appointed Reich Police Commissioners in Baden, Wuertem-burg, and Saxony, who promptly turned out the existing governments. On March 31st Hitler, through Frick, decreed the dissolution of the Diets of all other
Laender
, and a week later appointed a
Reichstatthaiter
to every State with the power to appoint and remove governments, promulgate State laws, appoint and dismiss State officials.

Then it was the turn of the Trade Unions. Through March and April the S.A. ran wild and looted the Trade Union branch offices. On the second day of May the offices were formally occupied by the S.A. and the S.S., officials were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and the Unions were merged into the New Labor Front under Robert Ley.

Finally came the dissolution of the opposition parties. On May 10th Goering occupied the buildings and newspaper offices of the great Social Democratic Party and ordered the confiscation of its funds. On June 19th what remained of the Party was put under a ban. On May 26th the assets and property of the Communist Party were confiscated. On June 14th all parties were officially banned and the National Socialist German Workers Party was declared “the only political Party in Germany.” It became
an offense to seek to maintain existing parties or to start new ones—an offense punishable with up to three years' penal servitude or imprisonment, “provided the action is not subject to a greater penalty under other regulations.”

In all this tumult the new Gestapo played only a small part. The youth of Germany, alive and ardent after years of frustration and apathy, stood behind the man who at last seemed able to do something active and bold to rehabilitate their shabby lives, and marched to the rhythm of
“Sieg Heil,”
intoxicated by a new sense of power which found its natural expression in revolutionary violence. The liberals, the sober thinkers, the balanced sceptics had failed, and Germany was still sunk in resentful chaos. The liberals now tried to block the new drive led by the magician Hitler which held the first real promise for many weary years. They had to go. They had nothing to offer but the infinite negative. If they would not go of their own accord they had to be trampled underfoot. And so they were. And so also were the Communists, who, instructed by the tortuous crassness of Stalin in Moscow, had made it clear that they would do nothing to support the liberals and the socialists in face of the new menace—because they believed that their own way to power led through the swift rise and fall of Hitler.

The conspiratorial leadership of the Nazi Party and the thugs who took to violence for the sake of violence were reinforced and upheld by the genuine revolutionary enthusiasm which Hitler had evoked and by the distrust of the Communists aroused by their own dreary methods. They caught up in their wake millions who should have known better, and few stopped to ask whether an advance towards the promised land led by Goering and Goebbels and organized by Himmler and Heydrich could in cold blood be regarded as desirable. The fathomless German cynicism which separates absolutely political action from private morals was never more manifest than during the spring and summer of 1933. It prepared the way for all that was to come.

By autumn the new police were controlling the levers of a State organization which had been completely transformed. While Rudolf Diels, at the head of the infant Gestapo in Berlin, was conducting the fight for his own
career in a welter of intrigue and violence, while the Gestapo itself was being used partly as a weapon in this fight, partly as a private weapon by Goering, partly to establish a dark, secret terror over Prussia—which ran parallel with, but much deeper than, the spectacular terror of the S.A.—Himmler and Heydrich waited and planned in Munich.

With Daluege in Berlin they already had a hold on Prussia through their S.S. cohorts, now very much a power in the land, and infiltrating every Government office. And when in October, 1933, the last restraints to the Nazi revolution were finally broken down and Hitler became in effect dictator of the Reich, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to centralize the various police forces in their political aspects on the Himmler machine.

In the next three months this was done, and the German people fearfully watched the rise of a new star in their midst—until, in early 1934, Heinrich Himmler had become, step by step, Chief of Political Police throughout the whole of Germany, except in Prussia. Himmler's Political Police was modeled on Goering's Gestapo—but with a difference: it was monolithic. It did not have to fight the S.S.—because it was the S.S. It could devote itself with single-mindedness to the task of smashing the S.A. and winning for itself the physical power upon which Hitler was to rest. It could devote itself to this task with all the more freedom since in the first year of the revolution the general political opposition had been broken—largely by the S.A.

But first Himmler had to conquer Prussia. He could not hope to smash Goering: the most he could do was to use him. Goering, too, wanted to smash the S.A. Thus there existed in the making an excellent arrangement for all. And in April, 1934, Himmler took over the running of the Prussian Gestapo and came with Heydrich to Berlin—Himmler in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, Heydrich with his S.D. in the Wilhelmstrasse, the two buildings separated from each other by a pleasant garden.

It was the Army which gave Himmler his supreme opportunity. It was the Army, therefore, the proud, stiff-necked generals, who regarded Hitler as a distasteful necessity—for it was Hitler alone who could give them a Germany in which they could prosper—who must accept direct responsibility for the rule of the Gestapo in its final and irresistible form.

Nobody knows precisely what took place at the interviews between Himmler, Goering, and Hitler which preceded the announcement, made on April 10th, 1934, that Himmler was to be Deputy Chief of the Gestapo under Goering. Goering clearly did not give in without a struggle. The Gestapo was his personal creation, and Rudolf Diels his private agent. Without any authority at all beyond that of his own pleasure, he had detached the Gestapo from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior when he became Prime Minister of Prussia and retained it as his own personal preserve. Even when Himmler took over effective control, it was as Goering's Deputy. But there were two things which influenced Hitler, and one of them also had a strong appeal to Goering.

The first was that Himmler could show how throughout German security had been brought to a very high pitch of efficiency as a result of the hand-in-glove working between the State Police and the Security Service of the S.S., under Heydrich. Sooner or later all the police forces of the Reich would have to be unified and centralized, like everything else; and he, Himmler, was clearly the man for the job. The second, and the decisive point for Goering, concerned the future of the S.A.

Hitler's mind at this time was full of the coming showdown with Roehm, the highly ambitious S.A. Chief of Staff. Roehm was one of his oldest friends, but already the differences that had flared up between them in 1930 were beginning to show again. To reassure Roehm and soothe his injured susceptibilities Hitler had given him Cabinet rank a few months before. But this had not helped a great
deal. The S.A., who had carried Hitler to power, were in a mood of disillusionment and apprehension. The revolution had not brought them to the promised land. After all the shouting and the tumult they faced a future which appeared by no means rosy in a land in which big business and Army caste, far from being swept away, were prospering more than ever. Their old, trusted leaders of the outlaw days seemed either to have given way to the corruption of power and the blandishments of the old ruling classes or else, like Hitler himself, to be so immersed in cares of State that they were separated from them by a gulf which, to all intents and purposes, was infinite.

Roehm strove to interpret their mood to Hitler, who understood perfectly well what was going on, but dared not quarrel with the financiers, who had backed him, and the Reichswehr, whose continued support he was going to need. In these months at the beginning of 1934 he had the choice of remaining with his old comrades, attempting by violence to carry through the National Socialist revolution to its logical end, with a very strong risk of defeat and downfall—or of abandoning the men who had carried him to power, making a pact with the men who had the checkbooks and the arms, and thus retaining his personal position. He chose the latter course, supported by Goering, who, with the acquisition of high rank, was becoming daily more authoritarian (he had been made a general by President Hindenburg some months before, which had pleased him mightily and brought out all his latent
Junker
snobbery). Goebbels, alone among his closest comrades, opposed him; but Goebbels could be relied upon to change his mind when he saw which way the cat was jumping.

The first manifestation of his choice was when, in February, Roehm presented a memorandum to the Cabinet demanding that the S.A. should form the basis of a new and expanded German Army, and that a new Minister of State should be appointed to control the Armed Forces together with all paramilitary formations—that Minister, it was clearly implied, was to be Ernst Roehm himself. The Army reacted indignantly to this idea, and Hitler refrained from supporting Roehm. At the same time he sought to exploit necessity to his own advantage by offering the sacrifice of the S.A. as a concession to the British, who were
beginning to be alarmed. Then he confided to Mr. Eden that he had plans for cutting down the S.A. from its present strength of three million to some seven hundred and fifty thousand. At one blow he proposed to appease and reassure the generals and gain the goodwill of the British Government, which was showing signs of uneasiness at the strength of Germany's paramilitary formations, as well it might. But it was not as easy as that. Roehm, besides being Hitler's oldest friend, the only one of his followers with whom he was on terms of natural intimacy, was, with his three million devoted brownshirts, very much a power in the land.

This was the situation when Himmler was appointed Deputy Chief of the Berlin Gestapo: a move which brought into action at Goering's side the growing might of the S.S. and the whole apparatus of the German police outside Prussia. It was the counterweight that Hitler needed.

There is no evidence to indicate that Hitler himself was then contemplating a massacre of his old comrades: he was intent only on clipping their wings. With the Army, the Police, and the S.S. on his side, this had become a possibility. Thus, eleven days after Himmler's appointment, Hitler embarked at Kiel on the cruiser
Deutschland
to take part in Naval maneuvers; and with him went the German High Command. On that April cruise from Kiel to Koenigsberg among the bleak waters of the Baltic the generals sold themselves to Hitler, and Hitler sold his old comrades to the generals. In return for the support of the Reichswehr Hitler agreed to keep the S.A. down. The men who were going to do the job were Goering and Himmler, and behind Himmler was Heydrich.

It is improbable that on the occasion of what was to be known as the
Deutschland
Pact either Hitler, or General von Fritsch, or Admiral Raeder, or anybody else were clear in their minds that the S.A. could be kept down only by the murder of its leaders. But Goering and Himmler, with Heydrich behind them, were more lucid. Goering detested Roehm for personal reasons: Goering himself had been the first Chief of the S.A. and deeply resented the growing importance of his successor. Himmler and Heydrich saw in him the only obstacle to the infinite expansion of the S.S. As far as Hitler was concerned, there was a
tense situation which had to be resolved by means which were not yet clear.

Throughout May and the greater part of June that situation smoldered. But as far as Goering and Himmler were concerned, the issue was settled. They simply had to perfect their plan and then jockey Hitler into a position from which he would be forced to give his consent to its execution. It was the first major operation of the new Gestapo, allied with Heydrich's S.D. And it entailed, as future operations were to entail, the fabrication of a bogus conspiracy and its subsequent “discovery.” Events, meanwhile, played into their hands. They had only to prepare the ground and wait.

Hitler, reluctantly, had been forced in April to face Roehm with a point-blank negative when he made a further demand that the Army should be based on the S.A. Roehm, resentful, and also bewildered by the course the revolution was taking, but still not contemplating the removal of Hitler personally, found himself confiding in General von Schleicher, the gallant war-horse of pre-Nazi intrigue, who, sniffing disruption in the air, had come out of his discreet retirement. Goering and Himmler watched this reunion and magnified tremendously the rumors which sprang from it. In the words of Wheeler-Bennett: