Hitler's Bandit Hunters (10 page)

The former military caste returned to the state under Weimar as police officers and public servants. The character of the uniformed police inclined toward internal security rather than simple beat policing. Policing within Germany consumed a broad interpretation of regulation and supervisory functions in the service of the state. It was a by-product of internal security. Richard Evans’ essay on the historical development of German policing, a compact survey of the period from 1800 to 1945, viewed this period as one of increased policing without a proportional reduction in crime. The contrasts in the development were profound but led to bureaucratization. French influence on German policing included the introduction of the gendarmerie in 1812, effectively containing the roving bands of robbers. Wilhelm Stieber’s undoubted performance on behalf of securing the Great General Staff was not matched in his handling of domestic policing. His underhand methods, including bribery, deception, and fraud, caused widespread corruption to develop within the Prussian police. Long after Stieber’s death in 1882, the German press continued to refer to political policing as
Stieberschen Art.
²¹
The gradual militarization of the police, so often used to explain away its inherent brutality, was an expression of Germany’s internal regulation through the dictatorship by state bureaucracy service and its inherent self-protectionism. Retiring professional soldiers then, like German public servants today, were a protected occupation with the right to permanent employment. Former army NCOs took up police employment on retirement, becoming military bureaucrats (
Militäranwärter
) within the national civilian administration.
²²

According to Richard Bessel, the Weimar police were “modern and democratic,” in contrast with the militarized police and “bureaucratic-soldier” of the Kaiserreich.
²³
Weimar followed the conventional path toward police professionalization through recruitment, training, and technology. The deployment of a professional police force depended on significant numbers of trained troopers and officers, although neither existed in 1920. The lack of available and untainted manpower was, in one form or another, a critical factor in policing until 1945. Attracted to the police as uniform body, former Kaiserreich police officers, veteran soldiers, and Freikorps bonded to form an inner “old school.” The Prussian Schutzpolizei, what Evans called a republican guard, had to contend with the ongoing pressure from within its ranks to adopt militaristic tendencies. Bessel thought the recruitment of younger men in the
final years of Weimar gave a fleeting glimpse of what might have been. He identified the police relationship with new technology and confidence in comprehensive training programs. The utilization of motor vehicles and advanced telecommunications indicated a corporate inclination for specialization. Police training schools and academies, including the School of Technology and Communications, trained cadets in a range of advanced skills and techniques.
²⁴

Weimar politicians, like politicians the world over, brandished slogans to encourage public acceptance of their protégés. The police force was not an exception when it was called the “guardian of public order and security, servant of the general public in selfless, devoted activity.”
²⁵
Carl Severing’s catchphrase, “The Police—Your Friend and Helper,” the official police motto, was, by today’s standards, a soundbite without substance. Legal scholars like Otto Loening were sceptical of these slogans. Loening believed they were poorly conceived, lacked authority, and were without adequate definition under the law.
²⁶
He accepted that the constitution granted the police the right to conduct interrogations and place listening devices for the sake of law and order. He, however, was not distracted by what he thought was thinly veiled politicking. He concentrated on the issue of ill-defined ordinances within police regulations that circumvented the constitution. Loening pointed out the growing inconsistency between federal and state policing. The police stood between soldiers and civilians and found solace in their exclusivity. Entrenched social distinctions between the police and the civilian world in Weimar came to resemble the distinction between soldiers and civilians in the Kaiserreich. Effectively, civil-police relations had superseded civil-military relations during the interwar years.

While police regulators and practitioners made uneasy bedfellows, Weimar society began to distill alternative forms of organized protection, more appropriately labeled guardianship. In terms of total policing, the federal and state police left a discernible vacuum that unsettled the public. Weimar was committed to national policing while the states were concerned with preventing anarchy on the streets. Under these circumstances, the middle class (
Mittelstand
) believed they went unpoliced. The rise of community self-policing and self-protection schemes reflected this perception. The political challenge of communal guardians undermined the case for professional policing. James Diehl has argued that the rise of radical militarized politics in Europe proved that Germany was not the only country affected by para-militarism. However, Diehl suggests that when the “respectable” middle classes endorsed the civic guards (
Einwohnerwehre
), Germany became the exception.
²⁷
Diehl explained that this was the by-product of Bismarck’s power politics, rooted in the hearts and minds of law-abiding citizens’ fear of enemies of the state (
Reichsfeinde
). The Kapp putsch was, in Diehl’s opinion, the catalyst for the growth in civic guards. In Munich, Epp raised the civic guards and the Technical Emergency Police (
Technische Nothilfe
), abbreviated as TN) to
secure public utilities.
²⁸
Armed bands (
Wehrbände
) and the political combat leagues (
politische Kampfbünde
) sustained militarism in German politics. In the first months of Hitler’s rule, volunteers to the Aachen police included members of the
Deutschenationalen Kampfringes.
²⁹
These volunteers were mostly war veterans, patriots, and middle-class professionals including foresters and influential businessmen.
³⁰
They also aspired to professionalism through regular training.
³¹

A bridge between the military and social militarism was established between the army and public associations. One such association was the League of Front-Soldiers, known as the Steel Helmets (
Stahlhelm
), founded by veterans of the Great War, in December 1918. Their initial intention was to keep alive the spirit of comradeship, born in the trenches, in common with a host of similar organizations around the world. The greeting of its members, “hail the front” (
frontheil
), symbolized the merger of trench culture and paramilitarism. While the Stahlhelm conducted obvious military activities, including weapons training and full-scale exercises, it also waged a hostile political campaign for a return to the pre-1914 order. The Stahlhelm administered a welfare campaign of social help for the poorer communities and charitable activities that included winter-help schemes. They were reasonably successful in proving an acceptable face to militarism under Weimar.
³²
There was a flood of political party protection squads. They were essential for protecting officials and ensuring the party message was delivered without interference. The Nazis raised two guard formations: the SA (
Sturmabteilung
) and the Protection Squad (
Schutzstaffel–SS
). The SS was initially formed as small elite to protect Hitler.
³³
Their growth in power and influence was because of Hitler. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler thought the SA would become the highly trained champions of national socialism, the devoted soldiers of the Nazi
Weltanschauung
. However, the unruly behavior of the SA, especially toward elements within the party, including himself, led Hitler to abandon the SS as a personal bodyguard.

In 1929, Hitler promoted Heinrich Himmler to Reichsführer-SS with the mandate to increase the post’s political authority and influence. Himmler arranged the central office of the SS and, in 1931, opened two branches that addressed questions of security and race. The Security Service (
Sicherheitsdienst–SD
), under Reinhard Heydrich, was an internal security bureau that monitored society and the party. The other was the SS Race and Settlement Office (
Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, RuSHA
), which, under Richard Darré, codified Blut und Boden ideas into SS dogma.
³⁴
In the early years, the SS leadership embedded its harsh discipline and blind obedience to Hitler that remained until May 1945.
³⁵
The end of freebooting paramilitarism coincided with the destruction of Ernst Röhm and the emasculation of the SA. The culling of Nazi comrades by the SS in June 1934, during the “night of the long knives,” was inevitable. The end of paramilitarism was confirmed in July 1934 when Hitler declared, “I elevate [the SS] to the status of an independent
organisation within the NSDAP subordinate to the supreme SS leader. The Chief of Staff and the Reichsführer-SS are both invested with the Party rank of Reichsleiter.”
³⁶

In 1935, Kurt Daluege, later the chief of the Order Police (
Chef der Ordnungspolizei
), mimicked Carl Severing when he asked the question, “What are the police for?” He believed that if the police were to meet the National Socialist mission then they should aspire to become soldiers of the community (
Gemeindesoldat).
³⁷
Erich Ludendorff also made an encore appearance at this time. In the chaos after 1918, he had brought together a disparate group of individuals that subsequently became the backbone of the Nazi Party. Epp, Hitler, Röhm, Hess, and Ludendorff shared a vision of the pure Germanic (Aryan) society, a militarized community, regimented, racist, rich in territories and raw materials, led by a man of vision.
³⁸
The Nazi mindset believed in Ludendorff for his near victory in 1918, the “stab-in-the-back” slogan, and his support for Hitler during the failed Munich putsch (1923). His book
Der totale Krieg
(1935) was published in the same year Hitler introduced the Nuremberg race laws and conscription, the key foundations of the racist militarized society.
³⁹
In Wilhelm Deist’s opinion, Ludendorff had drafted the blueprint for the Nazi concept of warfare. A vision of power lay at the heart of Ludendorff’s total war. This was a vision of conflict and struggle as the permanent way of life. Interpretations of Ludendorff’s “total war” have played down the experiences that underpinned his theories. The “Ober Ost” and his supreme command had scaled the heights of the purely militarized society, alien to civilian social norms.
⁴⁰
Ludendorff’s model for the militarized national community founded the Nazi concept of a national community (
Volksgemeinschaft
) and met Daluege’s ideas of a community soldier. He recommended the application of sweeping preventative measures to suppress “disgruntled” groups in times of war and their classification as enemies of the state.
⁴¹
Ludendorff answered Daluege’s question by encapsulating the role of a militarized police within the dogma of race and space.

In June 1936, Heinrich Himmler became chief of the SS (
Reichsführer-SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei
), marking the next stage in the radicalization of security. The merger of the SS and police signaled the rise of a national police force following the road of national security. Himmler’s experience of political soldiering, policing, and Nazi administrative politics was not the only reason Hitler chose him to become the supreme police officer. The exponent of guardianship policing, Himmler propagandized this mission as “inner security, the inner protection of the National Socialist people.” As he argued, “From the traditional concept of Police has arisen the new concept of a protective Corps of the German people. And just as the old idea was typically personified in the bailiff, the new idea also demands a new man.” Thus, he wrote, “The police again was carried into the midst of the people as an
important member for the protection and defense of the community.”
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Himmler’s legendary administrative skills, education and career, classical upbringing, degree in agricultural economics, and even his grasp of the principles of modern business, especially the concepts of profit and loss and the cost-benefit method of German bureaucracy, served as the guidelines for the SS corporation. From a bureaucratic standpoint, the merger of the SS and police simplified the regulation of doctrines. The administration of the Nuremberg race laws became a state code. In the codified nation, police officers and civilians alike could practice unrestricted institutional racism without telegraphing as publicly or overtly racist.

The elevation of his two lieutenants—Reinhard Heydrich as chief of the Security Police and Daluege as chief of the Order Police—amplified Hitler’s faith in Himmler as his highly motivated protégé.
⁴³
This triumvirate reinforced the competence of SS-Police leadership and proved highly productive.
⁴⁴
There were practicalities to this arrangement. Before his death, Röhm proposed creating a Nazi army by absorbing the Reichswehr into the SA and creating an armed state protection corps (
Staatsschutzkorps
) responsible for internal and external security. Hermann Göring proposed the transformation of the federated police forces into a centralized police army. Himmler’s plan involved centralizing all internal security assets into a single corporation led by the SS. Himmler’s triumph was the catalyst to all the ideas and the radical compromise for Nazi security.

This “new man” was mentally energetic and craved to follow in the footsteps of men such as Hitler and Ludendorff. He came from a family dominated by the father, a senior school official who taught the classics. Alfred Andersch did not write of Himmler’s father in glowing terms. He described him as a member of the Bavarian People’s Party, a conservative to the core (
Schwarz bis in die Knochen
), who was known for being a “rear-area stallion” (
Etappen-hengst
) and a fervent Catholic, but most notably a non-racist. Andersch portrayed the youthful Himmler as a fine young man, denied the chance of becoming a soldier, who moved in the correct circles of Hitler’s followers and the “Ludendorff people.”
⁴⁵
Fascinated by Germanic myths and mythology, Himmler grasped Hitler’s one-thousand-year Reich and, through Nazi symbiotic cultism, was able to flaunt his interests. His SS uniform collar patches combined the oak leaves of Germanic culture with the Roman laurel-leaf crown symbolizing the fusion of German mythology with ancient Rome. In climbing the greasy pole of Nazi politics, Himmler had self-styled his SS as Hitler’s Wagnerian Praetorian Guard.
⁴⁶
As Hitler’s most trusted soldier, Himmler was bent on imposing the lessons from the past as the benefactors to the Nazi future. “We are not wiser than the men of two thousand years ago,” he said. “Persians, Greeks, Romans and Prussians all had their guards. The guards of the new Germany will be the SS.”
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