Killing Hitler (3 page)

For all these caveats, Hitler’s victory was nonetheless substantial. The former corporal, beer-hall agitator, and self-confessed “drummer” for the nationalist cause had reached the pinnacle of political power. His followers, quite naturally, celebrated the success. Coordinated by Goebbels, the
Sturmabteilung
and
Schutzstaffel
of the capital congregated at the
Tiergarten
in preparation for an impromptu victory parade. Armed with torches, they set off in the evening gloom at 7 p.m., heading for the government quarter. Marching sixteen abreast to the thunderous acclaim of drums and military bands, they passed beneath the Brandenburg Gate and on into the Wilhelmstrasse, where they stopped to salute the aged president. Proceeding to Hitler’s new residence at the Reich Chancellery, they broke into a chorus of
“Sieg heil”
as they were greeted by the new chancellor from a first-floor window. Goebbels confided to his diary that it was “just like a fairy-tale.”
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Hitler’s newly exalted status brought with it new requirements for his security regime. For one thing, his appointment was a profound shock to all those who had considered him and his movement to be a passing phase, or even faintly ridiculous. It caused his opponents, passive and active alike, to sit up and take notice of him, and to consider what action might be taken in response. Hitler’s moment of triumph was arguably his moment of greatest vulnerability.

As chancellor, Hitler became heir to a surprisingly violent tradition of assassination plots. The famous nineteenth-century chancellor Otto von Bismarck had escaped two such attempts, and the volatile years after World War One had seen a spate of political murders, culminating in the assassination of the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in Berlin in the summer of 1922.

In the aftermath of that attack, security for the chancellor and his ministers was placed on an entirely new footing. Whereas previously, leading politicians would have been subject to only the most cursory of security measures—consisting of no more than a driver, an assistant, and perhaps a few policemen—they were now to be guarded much more closely. Barely five days after Rathenau’s murder, new measures were being suggested and implemented. A second escort car was to accompany the chancellor, for example, while security at the Reich Chancellery was thoroughly reorganized. All those who sent threatening or defamatory letters to ministers could expect to be investigated by the police. Any threats made were to be taken very seriously.
⁵

Thanks to these measures, a number of plots were discovered in the years prior to Hitler’s appointment. In the winter of 1922, for example, a Dresden merchant called Willi Schulze was found in possession of two pistols, with which, he confessed, he intended to murder Chancellor Wirth. Some years later, in 1931, a crude explosive device addressed to Chancellor Brüning was intercepted by security staff. The following year, a female assailant was caught inside the Chancellery building armed with a 28-centimeter dagger. In spite of the improved security regime, she had succeeded in gaining entry through a side door and had reached the second floor of the building before being apprehended.
⁶
The revised security apparatus clearly functioned. But with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, it was to face its toughest challenge.

For one so steeped in violence, it is perhaps no surprise that Hitler had a heightened sense of his own vulnerability to attack. Right from the outset of his political career, Hitler realized that he needed a bodyguard, a unit of unquestioned loyalty, a group of “men who would…even march against their own brothers.”
⁷
To this end, he employed a small coterie of toughs to serve as drivers, guards, and general factotums. This group was formed into the
Saalschutz
(Assembly-hall Protection) in 1920, which expanded to become the
Sturmabteilung
(SA, or “Storm Detachment”) the following year. Yet while the SA was responsible for
security in the broadest sense of the term, the more finessed requirements of Hitler’s personal safety were still handled by a small group of trusted men. These included the former wrestler Ulrich Graf, who served as Hitler’s bodyguard; Emil Maurice, a former watchmaker and
Freikorps
veteran, who was his driver; Christian Weber, a horse dealer and part-time pimp, who was his secretary; his valet, Julius Schaub; and his adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner. Between them, these men were initially responsible for Hitler’s safety at public events and speaking engagements. They formed the Führer’s innermost circle.

In the crisis year of 1923, it was decided to reorganize Hitler’s security. An élite guard was established, the
Stabswache
(Staff Guard), which was recruited from the ranks of the SA and was sworn to protect Hitler from both internal and external threats. When the
Stabswache
fell victim to internal SA squabbling, however, a new bodyguard was formed. The
Stosstrupp
(Assault Squad) numbered about a hundred individuals, but its core was still made up of Hitler’s old, informal bodyguards. Graf, Maurice, Weber, Brückner, and Schaub were all members. They would receive their baptism of fire in the Munich Putsch of November that year, when five of their number would be killed.
⁸

In 1925, following Hitler’s early release from prison, the Nazi Party and SA were refounded. The bodyguard was revived, too. It was initially given its original title of
Stabswache
but was then renamed the
Schutzstaffel
, the SS or “Protection Squad.” In contrast to the deliberate proletarianism of the SA, the SS was to be unashamedly elitist. Originally numbering only eight men, it grew slowly, as each party cell was obliged to provide an SS unit of no more than ten men to provide for security. By the late 1920s it numbered only around 280, in stark contrast to the 60,000-strong SA. SS applicants were strictly vetted and discipline was tight. Only “the best and most reliable Party members” would be considered.
⁹
They were to be efficient, resourceful, trustworthy, and above all “blindly devoted” to Adolf Hitler.
¹⁰
They would not participate in political discussions but would attend meetings intended for political instruction. They would not
smoke at party events, and would not leave the room until commanded to do so. Their motto was
“Meine Ehre heisst Treue,”
my honor is loyalty.

The SS would remain a relatively small, even insignificant organization until the advent of Heinrich Himmler. In January 1928, Himmler assumed responsibility for the everyday running of the SS; a year later he became its leader, the
Reichsführer-SS.
Under his stewardship, the SS was expanded, its discipline was tightened even further, and its unquestioning loyalty to Hitler was trumpeted once again. Himmler wanted to inculcate into the SS the same extreme ethos that he claimed of himself: “If Hitler were to say I should shoot my mother,” he once boasted, “I would do it and be proud of his confidence.”
¹¹

Thankfully, most of the tasks set for the SS were much more mundane, consisting of guarding the “Brown House,” the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, and providing routine security. One veteran of the period described the unit’s remit:

The SS…was still a very small group, sifted from the SA with the purpose of protecting the party, especially the party leadership, in public…. I was at several of the larger rallies in Hamburg. It was our job to shield the podium, accompany the speakers to and from their cars, guard their hotel and so on…things would often get pretty lively.
¹²

In stark contrast to the growing confidence of the SS, the SA was entering a period of crisis. By the late 1920s, the “brown ranks” of the SA had marched and fought, and had propelled the Nazi Party into the front rank of German politics. But Hitler, who was now increasingly playing the respectable bourgeois politician, had become faintly embarrassed by his mob. The vanguard of his revolution, he believed, had become a “dubious mass”—politically unreliable and totally unpredictable. Moreover, given that the SA contained a majority of unemployed members in many districts—some units could not even raise enough money for the requisite swastikas—he feared that it was becoming far too interested in
the socialist element of National Socialism. The party leadership, meanwhile, with its expensive cars and plush apartments, was widely seen by the SA as betraying its proletarian power base.
¹³
The crunch came in 1931, when much of the SA was drawn into a revolt under their deputy leader, Walther Stennes. Though they were soon brought back into the fold, the event sounded the movement’s death knell. Tellingly, the SS had remained scrupulously loyal to Hitler throughout.

Thereafter, as the SA waned, the SS was ideally placed to take over sole responsibility for Hitler’s security, and accordingly, Hitler’s new personal bodyguard would be drawn exclusively from its ranks. Its first commander, Sepp Dietrich, was a blunt Bavarian, a veteran of the
Freikorps
and the Munich Putsch, who would become one of the most decorated SS generals of the Second World War. Dietrich, who had joined the SS in 1928, rose quickly within the Munich cadre and within a year was a part of Hitler’s inner circle and one of his unofficial bodyguards. As the political temperature rose in Germany, however, and the violence reached unprecedented levels, it soon became necessary to put Hitler’s security on a more formal footing. In February 1932, Dietrich was requested to organize a permanent protection unit for the Führer. The result was the
SS-Begleit-Kommando “Der Führer”
(SS Escort Detachment). A contemporary described its men in vivid terms as

fine, athletic German types. They had zipped motor-car overalls over their black coated uniforms…and wore close-fitting aviators’ helmets. Armed with revolvers and sjamboks [hippopotamus whips]…they looked like men from Mars.
¹⁴

Another eyewitness was less flattering, describing the Führer’s bodyguards as “strangely delicate…almost effeminate.” Though he went on to wonder whether they might have been selected by the senior Nazi and notorious homosexual Ernst Röhm, he did at least concede, after spending an evening in their company, that “they were tough all right.”
¹⁵

Initially numbering only twelve men under the command of Dietrich, the bodyguard detachment was to accompany Hitler on the turbulent election campaigns of that year. An account by a British journalist described their modus operandi. In the spring of 1932, Hitler was campaigning in the East Prussian town of El-bing when his entourage was ambushed by communist protestors. As his driver swerved to avoid the mob,

Hitler’s leathercoated bodyguards had already leaped out of their car and were lashing out…with rubber truncheons and black jacks. Stones started to fly and pistol shots rang out. Then the…men were back in their cars and on we went.
¹⁶

When he was resident in Munich, Hitler’s security measures were more formal. His residence there, from 1931, was the so-called Brown House, an elegant three-story palace that had once served as the residence of the Italian emissary to the Bavarian royal court. The guard detail consisted of three shifts, each of seventeen men, drawn from the SS. Of these, at least ten were stationed inside the building, while a further six guarded the entrance, the grounds, and the perimeter. Access to the building was permitted only upon production of a valid pass.
¹⁷

It is, however, doubtful that the security in Munich was particularly effective. For one thing, prior to 1933, the guards on duty were forbidden to carry weapons. In addition, it does not appear that the measures instituted were always strictly followed. One British visitor to the Brown House, for example, recalled being barked at by the sentries not to walk on the pavement outside the building, but made no mention of encountering any security procedures once inside.
¹⁸
The security methods employed by Hitler in 1932 were, in truth, much as they had been in 1923. He had a dedicated and fiercely loyal bodyguard at his disposal, but its efficacy was open to serious doubt.

Part of the problem facing anyone attempting to create a credible security regime for Hitler was Hitler himself. The Führer’s attitude to his own security was shot through with contradictions
and inconsistencies. On one hand, he was almost obsessed with his own mortality. He viewed himself as the “man of destiny,” the man to lead Germany out of slavery. Yet his fragile constitution caused him to believe that his time was short. Hitler, in truth, was not a well man. It has long been conjectured that he may have suffered the effects of syphilis.
¹⁹
But in addition to that phantom, he clearly felt the very real strains of political life. By 1936, he was complaining of a whole catalogue of ailments, including tinnitus, migraines, insomnia, eczema, stomach cramps, flatulence, and bleeding gums.
²⁰
To this list one might add acute hypochondria. Hitler’s concern for his own health peaked in May 1935, when he convinced himself that a polyp removed from his larynx would prove cancerous. From that point, he became a man in a hurry, politically speaking. As he confessed to an intimate: “I shall never become the Old Man of the Obersalzberg. I have so little time.”
²¹

In addition to all that, Hitler was preoccupied with the idea that he might fall victim to an assassin. Consequently, as he persistently impressed upon his bodyguards, his own survival was of paramount importance. He took an extraordinarily detailed interest in security measures and demanded that they be constantly updated and intensified. He regularly carried a pistol in public, and his personal bodyguards and adjutants were also invariably armed.