Hitler's Hangman (29 page)

Nazi foreign policy towards a more aggressive strategy of expansionism in

1938 made it seem necessary to appease, rather than polarize, the home

front. Hitler gradually withdrew from any direct involvement in Church

politics and the fundamental reordering of relations between the Nazi

state and the Church that Heydrich and other party radicals had hoped

for was postponed until after the war.79

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While Hitler abstained from making public anti-Church statements

and Himmler officially instructed the SS to remain neutral in regard to

Church policy, Heydrich pushed on, presumably with Himmler’s blessing.

On 27 May 1937 he wrote to Hitler directly, asking to be permitted to

arrest dissident priests ‘for the preservation of state authority’ if they

became politically active. One year later, in June 1938, Heydrich wrote to

Hans Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, stating that the

Vatican was ultimately responsible for anti-German agitation from

Czechoslovakia and France. But Hitler continued to insist that the solu-

tion of the ‘Church problem’ had to be postponed until the end of an

increasingly likely international war. Only then did he want to solve the

problem as the last great task of his life.80

No such concern applied to smaller Christian Churches. Throughout

the 1930s the Gestapo devoted considerable energy and resources to the

persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a small religious sect founded in

the United States with no more than 26,000 members in Germany. The

‘crimes’ of the Jehovah’s Witnesses consisted in refusing to participate in

elections, to use the Hitler salute, to display the Nazi flag, to join Nazi

organizations and to perform military service. All of these things were

irreconcilable with their religious principles, which did not allow them to

swear allegiance to any worldly government or to serve any country. Given

their doctrinally rooted pacifism, Jehovah’s Witnesses were obvious targets

for Heydrich’s police apparatus. They were, in fact, the only group in the

Third Reich to be persecuted on the basis of their religious beliefs

alone. Jews were persecuted for their race, while individual Catholics and

Protestants were arrested because of their real or alleged political activism.81

In the course of 1936, the Gestapo increased the pressure on the group

and began the systematic use of torture methods during interrogations. A

first nationwide wave of arrests took place in August and September 1936.

But the Jehovah’s Witnesses continued to practise their religion illegally

and even conducted several leaflet campaigns against the Nazi regime in

December 1937. The ensuing new wave of arrests in 1938 practically

destroyed all remaining organizational networks before the end of that

year. Since the Jehovah’s Witnesses steadfastly rejected military service

after 1939, they were pursued with particular vigour during the war. It is

estimated that about 6,000 of them were arrested in the course of the

Third Reich and given their own concentration camp identification: a

purple triangle. Hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses died in camps and

prisons due to abuse and overwork, while others were executed outright.

Their suffering was immense, but ultimately their fate differed from that

of the Jews: in Heydrich’s view (and that of other senior Nazis) they were,

after all, ‘Aryans’ capable of redemption.82

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

The Freemasons

In his
Transformations of our Struggle
, Heydrich included the Freemasons

as arch-enemies of National Socialism alongside Jews, Bolsheviks and

politicizing priests. Heydrich viewed Freemasonry, like Bolshevism, as an

internationalist, anti-fascist ‘expedient organization [
Zweckorganisation
]’

of Jewry: ‘The Masonic lodges and their related organizations, which also

stand under Jewish control, have the sole purpose of organizing social life

in a seemingly harmless way while actually instrumentalizing people for

the purposes of Jewry.’83

Soon after the Nazi seizure of power, the German lodges were hit

by a wave of arrests, followed by their closure. The SD began to analyse

their confiscated documents and archives, including those of the Lodge

of the Three Sabres in Halle, of which Heydrich’s father, Bruno, had

been a member.84 By the mid-1930s, however, Heydrich had ceased

to perceive Freemasonry as an acute threat. Most lodges, confronted with

the Nazis’ open hostility, had either dissolved themselves in 1933 or

had been closed down by the Gestapo. Former members of Masonic

associations, known to the police after the lodges’ archives and member-

ship lists had been seized, were at a clear disadvantage in the Third

Reich, particularly if they were employed in the civil service, but they

were never subjected to similarly systematic persecution as Communists

or Jews. The fact that someone was a Freemason or had once belonged to

a lodge did not automatically lead to protective custody.85

The dwindling importance Heydrich attached to the ‘Freemason

problem’ was reflected in his organizational reform of the Gestapo and

the SD in 1936: the SD’s formerly independent Freemasonry desk merged

with the departments for Jewry and Church affairs into a department

for ‘worldviews’. From the summer of 1937, Heydrich’s Gestapo no longer

pursued the matter of Freemasonry.86 Instead, he perceived Freemasonry

as a ‘disappeared cult’ worthy of preservation in a museum – not entirely

dissimilar to the Central Jewish Museum that was set up by the

SS in Prague in 1942 to commemorate ‘a disappeared race’.87 Heydrich

ordered the establishment of a Freemasons’ Museum at Gestapo

headquarters in Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, in which the Masonic

lodges’ confiscated cult objects, libraries, membership lists and files

were on display. When, in October 1935, the Swiss emissary of the

International Red Cross, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, undertook an inspection

tour of German concentration camps, Heydrich explained to him that he

considered the Freemasons to be primarily ‘an instrument of Jewish

vengeance’. Should the Freemasons get the upper hand in their struggle

with National Socialism, they would unleash ‘orgies of cruelty’, compared

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to which the current measures adopted by the Nazis would ‘appear rather

moderate’.88

Two days later, Heydrich conducted his guest through his Freemasons’

Museum in Berlin. In the first room, Heydrich explained to Burckhardt,

were display cabinets with the names of all the world’s Freemasons,

ordered by country. A black-painted, windowless second room was in total

darkness, Burckhardt recalled:

Heydrich switched on a violet light and slowly there appeared all kinds

of Masonic cult objects in the shadows. Pale as a corpse in the artificial

light, Heydrich moved around the room talking about world conspira-

cies, degrees of initiation and the Jews, who, at the top of the Masonic

hierarchy, were working towards the destruction of all humanity. Even

darker, narrower rooms with low ceilings followed, which one could only

enter bent double, to be seized by the shoulders by the bony hands of

automatically operated skeletons.

By the mid-1930s, Heydrich clearly viewed the Freemason problem as an

issue of the past, fit for a ‘haunted house’-style museum in which he

sought to impress international visitors like Burckhardt.89

Asocials

In an essay on the tasks of the Security Police in the Third Reich written

in 1937, Heydrich argued that a close connection existed between conven-

tional crime and the ideological threats facing the Third Reich: ‘The . . .

subhuman doubly threatens the health and life of the body of the people

[
Volkskörper
]: by violating and shaking social norms as a criminal, and by

placing himself at the disposal of the enemies of our people as a tool and

weapon for their plans.’ Nazism’s international ideological opponents,

Heydrich continued, could easily recruit and instrumentalize criminal

‘subhumans’ because they were naturally ‘inclined towards subversion and

disorder’.90

The pursuit and arrest of ‘asocial subhumans’ was the responsibility of the

criminal police, whose job it was to ‘extirpate’ ‘career criminals’, whose deeds

Heydrich believed to indicate ‘bad blood’, and other social outcasts such as

homosexuals and women who, having undergone abortions, were regarded

as a threat to the Nazis’ demographic objectives.91 Heydrich’s criminal

police launched a major operation against ‘habitual criminals’ in 1937 and

another one against more broadly defined ‘asocials’ (codenamed ‘work-shy

Reich’) on 13 June 1938. In a letter of 1 June 1938, Heydrich had ordered

the various branch offices of the criminal police to take ‘
at least
200

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

able-bodied male persons (asocials)’ into protective police custody. Particular

attention, Heydrich insisted, was to be paid to tramps, beggars, Gypsies and

pimps as wel as ‘persons who have had numerous previous convictions for

resistance, bodily harm, brawling, disturbances of the peace and the like,

thus demonstrating that they do not wish to be part of the national

community’. Heydrich’s order justified the mass arrests by stating that

‘criminality has its roots in anti-social behaviour’, but also cited a second

motive: ‘the strict implementation of the Four-Year Plan’, the Nazi

programme designed in 1936 to achieve ful employment and build up

military resources. The fulfilment of this plan, Heydrich insisted, did not

al ow ‘anti-social persons to withdraw from work and thus sabotage’ the

economic objectives of the Hitler government. The operation fel within the

context of the forced transition from a labour market to ‘labour deploy-

ment’, thus attempting to eliminate the alarming labour shortage that

had resulted from the accelerated rearmament campaign which began

in 1935.92

The raids against ‘anti-social’ fringe groups continued over the following

months. By the end of 1938, a total of 12,921 asocials were being held in

preventive detention and 3,231 persons were under systematic surveil-

lance. Heydrich’s rigorous campaign against asocials certainly contributed

to a decline in crime rates, but more decisive was the waning of the global

economic crisis, which in turn reduced the enormously inflated crime rate

of the years between 1930 and 1933 to a normal level.93

In ‘protecting’ German society from asocials and political opponents,

Heydrich’s apparatus did not operate in isolation. Regular courts and state

prisons also played a key role in repressing opposition. A whole new set of

laws and decrees passed in 1933 vastly expanded the scope of existing

treason laws and the applicability of the death sentence. In 1937, the

courts handed down no fewer than 5,255 convictions for high treason.94

Those who were arrested and convicted were sent either to a concentra-

tion camp or to a normal prison depending on the nature and severity of

their crime. While the concentration camps were primarily reserved for

political prisoners during the first years of the Third Reich, this changed

in the course of the 1930s. During 1933, some 100,000 Germans, most of

them opponents of the new regime, were detained without trial in concen-

tration camps across the Reich. By early 1935, however, the vast majority

of them had been released on ‘good behaviour’, often after promising

future political abstinence. Almost all of the early concentration camps

were shut down by the end of 1933, and the number of inmates dropped

to 3,000 by early 1935. It was only from 1936 onwards that the number

of inmates increased again to a total of 21,000 prisoners by the outbreak

of the Second World War in September 1939. The majority of camp

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inmates were no longer political prisoners (who tended to be confined in

ordinary prisons), but ‘social outcasts’.95

In order to accommodate the growing number of prisoners, the SS

began to extend the concentration camp system. Between 1936 and 1937

the remaining early camps – Esterwegen, Sachsenburg, Columbia-Haus,

Lichtenburg and Sulza – were dissolved. Dachau was the only one of the

older camps to survive. Instead, the SS now began to build new and bigger

camps governed by the same regulations and disciplinary code as Dachau.

The ‘Dachau model’, designed to regiment the prisoners and dehumanize