Hitler's Hangman (43 page)

with prostitutes and their conversations secretly recorded. Nothing sensa-

tional was ever exposed.100

The structure of the RSHA reflected Heydrich’s attempt to avoid the

duplication of responsibilities between individual departments that had

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led to various rivalries and conflicts in the past, most notably between the

Gestapo and the criminal police, but also between the Security Police and

the SD. While the Gestapo now primarily concentrated on matters of

political persecution (directed against both Germans and foreigners living

in the Reich), the criminal police gained responsibility for policy areas

such as economic crimes and the combating of abortions and homosexu-

ality. ‘Preventive’ measures against asocials and criminals were now also

among the responsibilities of the criminal police.101

The RSHA became the central organization of the Nazi terror during

the Second World War, but measured against Heydrich’s original ambi-

tions of merging the SD, the Gestapo and the criminal police into a

tightly integrated state protection corps it was a heterogeneous institu-

tion: legally trained police officials worked alongside SD leaders, but the

SD continued to be financed by the party treasury whereas the Security

Police were funded by the state. This RSHA was not the tightly knit and

uniformly organized apparatus for which Heydrich had hoped, but rather

an institutional roof for the various agencies of the Nazi persecution appa-

ratus, albeit one run by a single administration and under the unifying

command of Heydrich.102

With a total of 3,000 employees, including secretaries and lower offi-

cials, and a leadership corps of some 400 men (and one woman) as heads

of individual desks or departments, the RSHA was not a huge institution,

but it was one that differed fundamentally from the traditional adminis-

tration in terms of purpose, institutional ethos and staff composition:

77 per cent of its leadership corps were born after 1900, most were from

middle-class families, two-thirds had completed a university education

and one-third had a doctoral degree, mostly in law, but also in literature,

history, theology and philology. The RSHA was thus an institution

for social climbers, not social failures. However, despite Heydrich’s prefer-

ence for well-educated members of staff, he was also consciously anti-

intellectual. Scholarship had to be political. Ideas could be proven only

through deeds. What Heydrich wanted was the creation of an ideologi-

cally committed vanguard or ‘fighting administration’, an elite which

would not only devise new policies but also implement them. Deeds,

not words, were what mattered. Most of the members of the RSHA

leadership corps, for example, served both in senior administrative func-

tions in Berlin and as heads of the
Einsatzkommandos
in the course of

the war. In that sense, the RSHA was a flexible organization, constantly

modifying and reorganizing its departments, as well as a mobile institu-

tion, whose staff were frequently ordered to fulfil different tasks, from

administration jobs in Berlin to participation in fighting and mass killings

in the field.103

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The RSHA’s imperfect organizational structure in no way diminished

the radicalism of its employees. On the contrary, the loose administrative

structure created room for competition between individual desks and

departments, leading to increasingly radical initiatives. Heydrich publicly

prided himself on having created a police apparatus which was composed

of ‘ideologically committed Nazis’, ‘political soldiers’ of the ‘hidden front’,

an institution that united under one roof political problem analysis,

operational organization and implementation.104

Shortly after the establishment of the RSHA, Heydrich’s restructured

terror apparatus was confronted with its first major challenge. On the

evening of 8 November 1939, at 9.20, a bomb exploded in Munich’s

Bürgerbräukeller, the venue for Hitler’s annual commemoration speeches

on the anniversary of his failed 1923 putsch. The explosion, set off shortly

after the Führer had left the building, killed eight people and wounded

dozens. If Hitler, concerned about the bad weather, had not curtailed his

speech in order to take an earlier return flight to Berlin, he, too, would

have been killed in the explosion. The man responsible for the assassina-

tion attempt was caught that same night: Georg Elser, a thirty-eight-year-

old cabinet-maker, was arrested while trying to cross the German–Swiss

border. In view of the political sensitivity of the case, Heydrich and

Himmler personally took charge of the investigations.105

Although during the interrogations Elser insisted that he had planned and

carried out the assassination attempt without any assistance, Heydrich and

the Gestapo officers investigating the case at first doubted his claims. Instead,

they believed that it was a plot against Hitler orchestrated by the British

Secret Intel igence Service.106 Coincidental y, the fol owing day, an SD

commando under Walter Schel enberg abducted two British SIS agents,

Sigismund Payne Best and Richard Stevens, from the Dutch border town of

Venlo and brought them to Berlin for interrogation. Heydrich wrongly

assumed that the SD had penetrated a British secret operation with the aim

of eliminating Hitler – an assumption that reflected his penchant for spy

stories and conspiracy theories and that was not supported by any solid

evidence.107

Elser was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was

murdered in early 1945, shortly before the Red Army liberated the camp.

His fate was shared by a growing number of people. Between August 1939

and the spring of 1942, the number of inmates in concentration camps

(excluding those in the death camps constructed further east from late

1941 onwards) rose from about 21,000 to just under 80,000, with most of

the new arrivals being non-Germans.108

In order to cope with this new influx, four new concentration camps –

Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler – were built

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between the outbreak of war and the spring of 1941, in addition to the six

camps that had already existed within the Greater German Reich before

September 1939: Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg,

Buchenwald and the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. Living conditions in

these increasingly overcrowded camps deteriorated quickly: food rations

decreased substantially, maltreatment became more widespread and

mortality rates in the prisoners’ barracks rose steadily.109

Although he continued to be in charge ‘only’ of the internment and

release of prisoners, and not of camp life itself (which remained the

responsibility of Theodor Eicke), Heydrich was heavily involved in the

question of how enemies of the state should be treated once imprisoned.

In January 1941, he established three categories of concentration camps,

which were meant to reflect both ‘the personality of the prisoners and the

degree of danger they represent for the state’. The so-called ‘lesser

compromised’ prisoners whom Heydrich considered ‘capable of improve-

ment’ were sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, of which the

latter initially served as a ‘category I’ concentration camp and became a

fully operational extermination camp only in early 1942. The more ‘seri-

ously compromised’ inmates whose re-education would take longer were

to be sent to ‘category II’ camps, namely Buchenwald, Flossenbürg and

Neuengamme. The only ‘category III’ camp, Mauthausen, was reserved for

‘seriously compromised’ prisoners who were unlikely to be capable of

reintegration into the people’s community. Mauthausen indeed proved to

be the camp within the German Reich with the harshest living conditions

for inmates and the highest mortality rates.110

Concentration camps were not the only penal institutions for those

arrested by Heydrich’s men or Kurt Daluege’s Order Police. Throughout

the history of the Third Reich, the number of inmates in normal prisons

remained substantially higher than those in concentration camps, rising

from over 108,000 inmates in the summer of 1939 to over 180,000 at the

time of Heydrich’s death in the summer of 1942. These figures included

ordinary criminals such as murderers, rapists and thieves, but after 1939

the definition of what constituted criminal behaviour was cast ever wider

to include people deemed work-shy or defeatist, all of whom were now

also considered enemies of the state.111

Harsh treatment was also issued to ‘deviant youths’, notably the famous

‘Swing Kids’ who formed an illegal counter-culture to the Hitler Youth by

secretly listening to jazz and organizing dance parties at which they played

‘degenerate’ English or American music. With strongholds in larger cities

such as Hamburg or Berlin, the largely apolitical Swing Kids’ crime

consisted of defying the military culture that permeated the Hitler Youth

and cultivating a musical taste that the Nazis considered inappropriate for

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German youth. Himmler urged Heydrich not to show any leniency

towards their rebellious behaviour and asked him to ‘radically eradicate’

the ‘whole evil’. The ‘ringleaders’, Himmler insisted, were to be sent to a

concentration camp where they ‘will have to be beaten before undergoing

rigorous exercising and engaging in hard labour’. Their internment was to

last no less than two years. Heydrich happily complied: after a first round

of arrests in August 1941, the Gestapo broadened its operations in early

1942 and sent several ringleaders to concentration camps throughout the

Reich.112

Others fared even worse. According to Heydrich’s guidelines of 3

September, his terror apparatus was authorized to execute people without

trial, even for minor crimes. This ‘special treatment’, as it was generally

termed, was carried out in concentration camps, ordinary prisons and

labour camps.113 In implementing this policy, secrecy was of the essence,

both in view of popular opinion and with respect to the Reich’s new diplo-

matic relations with the Soviet Union after the conclusion of the Hitler–

Stalin Pact in August 1939. As Heydrich pointed out in February 1940,

the pact had created a ‘completely new situation’ as far as foreign policy

was concerned, even though on the domestic front the Communists

remained the enemy above all others.114

Within the Third Reich, special treatment was particularly aimed at one

‘opposition group’, which would grow exponentially over the course of the

Nazi conquest of Europe: foreign labourers living in Germany. From late

1939 onwards, various state agencies dealt intensively with the issue of

how to segregate from the German population the vast number of Polish

prisoners of war and workers who had streamed into the Reich. In March

1940, the question was comprehensively regulated through Hermann

Göring’s so-called Polish decrees. Gestapo agencies were authorized to

punish ‘transgressions’ committed by Polish labourers – ‘chronic careless

working’, work stoppages or acts of sabotage – without reference to any

other institution, such as the courts of law. The measures that could be

adopted included internment in labour or concentration camps and, in

serious cases, execution. Sexual relations between Polish workers and

Germans were to be punished by shooting the Polish worker without trial

and the deportation of the German partner, whether male or female, to a

concentration camp.115

Apart from Polish slave labourers, one other ‘enemy group’ within

wartime Germany was targeted by Heydrich’s apparatus with particular

rigour: the Jews. Surveillance of Jews living in the Third Reich intensified

drastically after the start of the war. From September 1939 onwards,

the RSHA reinforced its control over the Reich Association of Jews,

which had been created in 1939 as an umbrella organization for all

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remaining Jewish organizations in Germany. In the first months after

the outbreak of war, Heydrich and his RSHA further perfected mecha-

nisms for excluding the Jews from German society. On 12 September

1939, for example, Heydrich banned Jews from shopping in all but a few

select food shops. Less than two weeks later, he ordered all radio sets in

the possession of Jews to be confiscated throughout the Reich.116

Polish slave labourers and German Jews were the chief victims of