Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (57 page)

Hence, when Hitler took power, Himmler was able quickly to expand his organization into a complete security system, with its own military units (the
Waffen
ss), and an organization called the
Totenkopfverbände
(Death’s Head Units) to run concentration camps and for other special duties. The last included many criminals,
such as Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hess, who had already served a sentence for murder.
⁹⁶
Himmler’s initial job was merely as police chief in Munich, and he required the permission of the Catholic Prime Minister of Bavaria, Heinrich Held, to set up his first concentration camp at Dachau, an announcement duly appearing in the press:

On Wednesday 22 March 1933, the first concentration camp will be opened near Dachau. It will accommodate 5,000 prisoners. Planning on such a scale, we refuse to be influenced by any petty objection, since we are convinced this will reassure all those who have regard for the nation and serve their interests.

Heinrich Himmler, Acting Police-President of the City of Munich.
⁹⁷

Himmler’s earliest ‘protective custody’ orders read: ‘Based on Article 1 of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and the State of February 28 1933, you are taken into protective custody in the interests of public security and order. Reason: suspicion of activities inimical to the state.’ Unlike Goering, Himmler, at this stage, showed himself anxious to observe the formalities of the Nazi state, such as they were. But the camp regulations he compiled indicated from the very start the horrifying comprehensiveness of the powers Himmler and his men enjoyed and the unrestricted use of terror:

The term ‘commitment to a concentration camp’ is to be openly announced as ‘until further notice’ …. In certain cases the Reichfuhrer ss and the Chief of the German Police will order flogging in addition …. There is no objection to spreading the rumour of this increased punishment … to add to the deterrent effect. The following offenders, considered as agitators, will be hanged: anyone who … makes inciting speeches, and holds meetings, forms cliques, loiters around with others; who for the purpose of supplying the propaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories, collects true or false information about the concentration camps.
⁹⁸

Himmler’s impeccable bureaucratic paperwork and his genuflections to legality (when he sent his aged parents for drives in his official car he always noted the cost and had it deducted from his salary
⁹⁹
) were fraudulent, as was the similar pseudo-legal framework under which the
OGPU
worked in Soviet Russia. Hans Gisevius, a Gestapo official, later testified: it was always a favourite ss tactic to appear in the guise of a respectable citizen and to condemn vigorously all excesses, lies or infringements of the law. Himmler … sounded like the stoutest crusader for decency, cleanliness and justice.’
¹⁰⁰
He was anxious to distance his men from the ruffianly
SA
street-fighters and Goering’s Gestapo. Inside the camps, however, there was no difference: all was unspeakable cruelty, often sadism, and the negation of law.

A typical case-history, one of many thousands, was that of the Jewish poet Erich Muhsam. He had taken part in Eisner’s reckless Bavarian Socialist Republic, and served six years in prison for it, being amnestied in 1924. Immediately after the Reichstag fire, fearing arrest, he had bought a ticket to Prague, but had then given it to another intellectual who was even more frightened than he was. He was pulled in and taken to Sonnenburg camp. They began by smashing his glasses, knocking out his teeth and tearing out chunks of his hair. They broke both his thumbs so he could not write, and beating about the ears destroyed his hearing. He was then moved to Cranienburg camp. There, in February 1934, the guards had possession of a chimpanzee which they found in the home of an arrested Jewish scientist. Assuming it was fierce, they loosed it on Muhsam, but to their fury the creature simply flung its arms round his neck. They then tortured the animal to death in his presence. The object was to drive Muhsam to suicide. But he would not comply; so one night he was beaten to death and hanged from a beam in a latrine. Muhsam had become wise in the ways of totalitarianism, and before his arrest had given all his papers to his wife, with express instructions on no account to go to Moscow. Unfortunately, she disobeyed him and took the papers with her; and as soon as the Soviet authorities got their hands on them they arrested her. She spent the next twenty years in Soviet camps as a ‘Trotskyite agent’, and the papers are to this day under lock and key in the so-called ‘Gorky Institute for World Literature’ in Moscow.
¹⁰¹

The lawlessness of Hitler’s Germany, beneath a thin veneer of legal forms, was absolute. As Goering put it, ‘The law and the will of the Führer are one.’ Hans Frank: ‘Our constitution is the will of the Führer.’ Hitler worked entirely through decrees and ordinances, as opposed to law, here again resembling Lenin, who never showed the slightest interest in constitution-making.
¹⁰²
In any matters which were of interest to the Nazis, the Ministry of Justice did not function. Its boss Franz Guertner, who in 1924 as Bavarian Justice Minister had granted Hitler’s early release, was a nonentity who claimed he stayed on to fight Hitlerism but in fact was never allowed to talk to Hitler on any subject except novels. Shortly before his death in 1941 he told Frank: ‘Hitler loves cruelty. It pleases him … when he can torment someone. He has a diabolical sadism. Otherwise he simply could not stand Himmler and Heydnch.’
¹⁰³
Hitler himself said: it was only with the greatest difficulty that I was able to persuade Dr Guertner … of the absolute necessity of exercising the utmost
severity in cases of treason.’
¹⁰⁴
But this was just talk. In fact Hitler frequently altered what he saw as ‘lenient’ sentences, imposing the death-penalty instead. He changed the 1933 Civil Service Law, adding paragraph 71, which empowered him to dismiss a judge if ‘the manner of his official activities, in particular through his decisions … shows that he finds the National Socialist
Weltanschauung
alien’ (an example cited was giving the minimum sentence for ‘racial defilement’).
¹⁰⁵

But Hitler did not even like removable or subservient judges. Like Marx and Lenin, he hated lawyers – ‘a lawyer must be regarded as a man deficient by nature or deformed by experience’, he said – and he eventually superimposed on the ordinary juridical system the Nazi ‘People’s Courts’, a Leninist device which achieved its sombre apogee under the ferocious Roland Freisler in 1944–5.
¹⁰⁶
No protection against Nazi encroachments on the rule of law or civil liberties was ever offered by the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, who was a Nazi himself. In 1930–2 Frick was seen by outsiders as second only to Hitler in the movement, but in fact he was a weak man and since his Ministry had lost actual control of the police, neither he nor it counted for anything. The only important contribution it made to Hitler’s rule was the drafting (under Dr Hans Globke, later to serve Dr Adenauer) of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws for the Jews. It remains an argument to this day whether the code had the effect of diminishing the appalling acts of violence carried out against Jews by local Nazis, as Globke claimed, or whether it gave moral and legal authority to systematic persecution.
¹⁰⁷

The manner in which Hitler ran internal security, using three competing systems (ss,
SA
, and Goering’s police and Gestapo) and two ministries which did not function on important matters, was characteristic. As the state had no constitution (other than the anaesthetized Weimar one) so it had no system of government. Or rather it had several. There was the party system of forty or so
Gauleiters
, a powerful collegiate body, whom Hitler could make or break individually but whom he did not choose to defy as a group. The Düsseldorf
Gauleiter
, Florian, claimed he had never invited Himmler into his
Gau
and had forbidden his men to co-operate with the Gestapo. The actual party leader, as Hitler’s deputy, was Rudolph Hess. But Hess was an ineffectual mystic. More important was Martin Bormann, a convicted murderer and a hard-working, Stalin-like party bureaucrat, who waged constant battles against the
Gauleiters
, on the one hand, and Goering and Goebbels on the other.
¹⁰⁸

Hitler did not object to these internal battles; on the contrary, he promoted them. ‘People must be allowed friction with one another,’ he said. ‘Friction produces warmth, and warmth is energy.’ He called
it ‘institutionalized Darwinism’. If Hitler met resistance from any ministry, he created a duplicate. He called the Foreign Ministry, still stuffed with aristocrats, ‘an intellectual garbage heap’, and from 1933 set up a rival organization under Joachim von Ribbentrop, which often stole the ministry’s mail and answered it.
¹⁰⁹
The Ministry of Labour, under Franz Seldte, was particularly obstructive. So Hitler appointed one of his
Gauleiters
, Fritz Sauckel, General Plenipotentiary for Work Mobilization.
¹¹⁰
Again, frustrated on the economic and financial front, Hitler created a duplicate economics ministry, called the Four Year Plan, under Goering. By 1942, in addition to the quota of ministries he had inherited from Weimar, Hitler had created fifty-eight Supreme Reich Boards, plus many other extra-governmental bureaux. Overlapping was universal and deliberate. It suited Hitler that Ribbentrop and Goebbels, for instance, should fight each over for control of external propaganda, down to the point where their men had pitched battles over radio equipment. Then both would appeal to him to arbitrate.

Any authoritarian system which abandons constitutional procedures and the rule of law is bound to contain an element of anarchy. Stalin’s regime was not dissimilar, though he was more methodical than Hitler. The term ‘Bohemian’, which Hindenburg used of Hitler, was apt. He hated settled hours. After Hindenburg’s death he combined the offices of Chancellor and President, and used this as an excuse to destroy the formal working of both. An old-fashioned civil servant called Dr Hans Lammers kept up a semblance of order in the Chancellery office, and he and his staff of ten to twelve
Beamten
answered Hitler’s mail of about 600 letters a day. Hitler never seems to have written a letter or signed any official documents. As soon as he was in power he did his best to have all documents which mentioned him (including tax records) destroyed, and thereafter he was extraordinarily reluctant to issue any written directives. About the only documentary holograph of Hitler’s we possess dates from before the First World War.

When Hitler first became Chancellor he got to his desk at 10 am, but he soon tired of routine and gradually took to working at night. He moved constantly around the country, like a medieval monarch, and even when in Berlin often refused to take decisions, claiming he was not a dictator.
¹¹¹
He disliked cabinet meetings precisely because they were an orderly decision-making procedure. He held them at ever-growing intervals; even when they did take place, the really important business was done elsewhere. Thus when Hitler fired Hjalmar Schacht he appointed Walter Funk Minister of Economics during an interval at the opera, and introduced him without warning at the next cabinet meeting (4 February 1938), the last he ever held.
¹¹²
There is no doubt whatever that all important decisions were taken by Hitler personally, as a rule in
bilateral meetings with individual ministers or bosses, but they are never reflected in the records, except indirectly. Hitler’s orders were always oral, often emerging incidentally in the course of long harangues, and sometimes given on the spot to whoever happened to be around.
¹¹³

Hitler’s state was not corporatist because corporatism implies a distribution of power between different bodies, and Hitler would share power with no one. He did not mind senior members of the gang running little private empires, subject to his ultimate power to break them. But Lammers testified at Nuremberg that he would not allow them to meet together, even informally, so they were never able to resolve their differences in collegiate fashion. Hitler’s regime, therefore, was marked by constant bilateral and multilateral struggles between its component parts, what Hobbes called ‘a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death’.
¹¹⁴
Goering tapped his colleagues’ telephones from his ‘research office’ and acquired such useful treasures as a set of love-letters from Alfred Rosenberg to a comely Jewess.
¹¹⁵
Bormann spied on all. So, of course, did Himmler and Heydrich. Virtually everyone was in a position to blackmail everyone else, and as each sought to win Hitler’s goodwill by betraying what he knew of the others, the Führer was kept well informed.

No government run in this fashion could hope to pursue consistent and carefully thought out policies, and Hitler naturally failed to do so, even on matters about which he felt most passionately. He promised to help small businesses, the peasants, the agricultural sector, to cut the big cities down to size, to bring womenfolk back from the factories into the home, to take back industry from the capitalists, the land from the
Junkers
, the army from the ‘vons’, the administration from the
‘Doktors’.
He did none of these things. On the contrary: the cities, big business and industry flourished, and peasants and women continued to flock into the workshops.
¹¹⁶
Army, business, the civil service remained much the same.