The Third Reich at War (85 page)

As time went on, the Nazi Party began to move into the domestic power vacuum. On 20 August 1943, Hitler dismissed Interior Minister Frick, providing him with a meaningless title (Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where Karl Hermann Frank, now appointed State Minister for Bohemia and Moravia, continued in practice to be in charge). Goebbels had been arguing for Frick’s dismissal for years. He was old and worn out, the Propaganda Minister said, and the decline in popular morale needed a tougher approach to the home front. The man Hitler chose to replace Frick was Heinrich Himmler, whose elevation implied an escalation of police repression to confront the possibility of demoralization turning into open resistance.
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At the same time, Martin Bormann effectively used his control over access to Hitler to sideline the civil administration and many of its ministers. By the beginning of 1945, Lammers was complaining that he had not seen Hitler since September the previous year and that he was ‘continually being pressed from all quarters to obtain the numerous decisions which are urgently awaited from the Leader’.
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The head of the civil service was thus reduced to asking the head of the Party Chancellery to allow him to see the head of state. The eclipse of the traditional state administration in comparison to the Party could not have been made more obvious. And it was underlined still further by the growing power of Goebbels, whose initiative for ‘total war’ in 1943 succeeded, among things, in bringing him closer to the centre of economic management than ever before.
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As soon as the war began, the Party’s Regional Leaders had been appointed to the new posts of regional Reich Defence Commissioners, a position that enabled them to act independently of the existing civil governors and regional military authorities. The subsequent quarrels over competence ended in victory for the Party on 16 November 1942, as the number of Reich Defence Commissioners was increased from thirteen to forty-two and the regions they covered made identical to the Party Regions. Further struggles for power ensued as Bormann’s attempts to control them from the Party Chancellery were frustrated by the direct access they enjoyed to Hitler. Increasingly, they tended to use their own people to put their orders into effect, rather than going through regional state administrations as they were supposed to. After March 1943 they ran up against the new Reich Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler, surely a more formidable opponent than his predecessor, Wilhelm Frick, but Himmler too was faced with the loss of effectiveness of the civil administration under the impact of war. A report he commissioned from Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich’s successor as head of the SS Security Service, submitted on 26 August 1944, confirmed that the Regional Leaders were bypassing state administrators with their own staff. Kaltenbrunner noted despairingly:

The public does not appreciate it when, in the present situation, comradely cooperation does not always have priority and instead people take the opportunity of contriving shifts in the domestic balance of power. The constant necessity for the local government organs to defend their position causes a loss of energy, inhibits initiative, and on occasion produces a sense of helplessness.
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As the military situation deteriorated, Party officials became ever more concerned to shore up morale and isolate ‘grumblers’ and complainers. Each Block Warden, according to a set of instructions issued by Robert Ley in his capacity as Reich Organization Leader of the Party on 1 June 1944, had to visit every household at least once a month and reassure himself that the inhabitants had the correct level of political and ideological commitment. The worse things got, the more the Party tried to re-create the atmosphere of the ‘time of struggle’ before 1933.
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The growing power and influence of the Nazi Party was welcomed by many in its ranks, who had seen themselves overshadowed to this point by the military. ‘On the whole,’ wrote Inge Molter, whose father had joined the Nazi Party in Hamburg in 1932, to her husband, Alfred, on 7 August 1944, ‘these times remind me at the moment strongly of the time of struggle. Just like in those days, Papa has to give every free minute to the Party.’
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II

The higher levels of ideological commitment demanded during the war were enforced by a whole new raft of legal sanctions. As Roland Freisler, State Secretary in the Reich Justice Ministry, declared in September 1939:

Germany is engaged in a fight for honour and justice. More than ever, the model of devotion to duty for every German today is the German soldier. Anyone who, instead of modelling themselves on him, sins against the people has no place in our community . . . Not to apply the most extreme severity to such pests would be a betrayal of the fighting German soldier!
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Looming behind such considerations was the perennial spectre of 1918. Another statement from the Reich Justice Ministry in January 1940 made the point clear:

During the war, the task of the judicial system is the elimination of the politically malicious and criminal elements who, at a critical moment, might try to stab the fighting front in the back (e.g. the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of 1918). This is all the more important in that experience shows that the sacrifice of the lives of the best at the front has the effect of strengthening the inferior elements behind the front.
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The Social Darwinist thinking in statements such as this was reflected in a further move towards the prosecution and punishment of offenders because of who they were, not because of what they had done. The new laws, often cast in vague terms, replete with references to ‘national pests’ (
Volksscḧdlinge
) made this clear. As soon as the war broke out, the death penalty was applied to anyone convicted of ‘publicly’ trying to ‘subvert or cripple the will of the German or of an allied people to military self-assertion’.
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A Decree Against National Pests issued on 5 September 1939 subjected to capital punishment anyone convicted of crimes against property or persons committed during the blackout, including looting, and anyone damaging the will of the German people to fight. The use of guns in committing violent crimes was made punishable by death from 5 December 1939. The Reich Criminal Code was amended to apply the death penalty to anyone causing a ‘disadvantage’ to Germany’s war effort. These offences included, for example, making ‘defeatist’ comments. Another decree made the hoarding or concealment of food supplies punishable by death. This was also the sanction applied to anyone found deliberately damaging military equipment or producing faulty munitions. Altogether, by early 1940, more than forty different offences, some of them, like the above, extremely vaguely defined, were punishable by execution. In 1941 the death penalty was extended to cover serious ‘habitual criminals’.
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Not surprisingly, executions for criminal offences now began to increase. In 1939 329 people were sentenced to death in the Greater German Reich; in 1940 the figure went up to 926, and in 1941 to 1,292, before leaping dramatically to 4,457 in 1942 and 5,336 in 1943. Altogether, the courts of the Third Reich, and especially the regional Special Courts and the national People’s Court, handed down 16,560 death sentences, of which 664 were passed in 1933-9 and 15,896 during the war. Roughly 12,000 of them were carried out, the rest being commuted to life imprisonment. The People’s Court itself handed down more than 5,000 death sentences during the whole course of its life, over 2,000 in 1944 alone. Since 1936, executions in Germany had been carried out by the guillotine, but by 1942 the official state executioners were also using hanging, on the grounds that it was quicker, simpler and less messy. So many executions were taking place in Germany’s state prisons by this time that the Ministry of Justice allowed them at any time of the day instead of, as previously, only at dawn. New executioners were hired, virtually all of them from the long-established milieu of the professional executioner, with its connections to the old trades of butchery and horse-knacking. By 1944 there were ten principal executioners at work, with a total of thirty-eight assistants working for them. One subsequently claimed to have dispatched more than 2,800 offenders during his term of office from 1924 to 1945. The time that was now allowed to elapse between sentencing and execution was often no more than a few hours, certainly not long enough for appeals for clemency to be prepared and considered. Nevertheless, the death rows in German prisons began to suffer from serious overcrowding. Roughly half the executions carried out up to the end of 1942 were of non-Germans, mainly Polish and Czech forced labourers, who, as we have seen, were subject to particularly draconian legal sanctions. On the night of 7-8 September 1943, the Ministry of Justice ordered the immediate hanging of 194 prisoners in the Pl̈tzensee jail in Berlin to reduce the overcrowding, which had become worse since an air raid had damaged a number of cells in the prison. After seventy-eight had been killed, in batches of eight, it was discovered that the wrong files had been taken out of the prison office, and six of the prisoners executed had not been sentenced to death at all. Characteristically, the Ministry officials focused not on dealing, even if retrospectively, with this injustice but on finding the six other prisoners who should have been executed. By the morning of 8 September the executioner, his request for a twenty-four-hour break in the middle of the process having been brusquely rejected, had completed his work with a further 142 hangings. The bodies were left lying about in the open, in very hot weather, for several days until they were removed.
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Such measures, especially when applied to native Germans, reflected not least Hitler’s own long-held belief that the German judicial system was too lenient. On 8 February 1942, for example, he complained privately that too many burglars and thieves were sent to prison, where they were ‘supported at the expense of the community’. They should be ‘sent to a concentration camp for life or suffer the death penalty. In time of war,’ he added, ‘the latter penalty would be appropriate, if only to set an example.’ But the judicial system was still obsessed with ‘finding extenuating circumstances - all in accordance with the rites of peacetime. We must have done with such practices.’
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In March 1942 he was so outraged when he read a newspaper report of a five-year prison sentence handed down by a court in Oldenburg to a man who had beaten and abused his wife until she had died that he phoned up State Secretary Schlegelberger in the Justice Ministry ‘in the greatest passion’ to complain about it.
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The matter obviously still rankled when he came to deliver a major speech in the Reichstag on 26 April 1942, broadcast all over Germany. ‘From now on,’ he declared to vigorous applause, ‘I am going to intervene in these cases and relieve of their office judges who are obviously failing to realize the requirements of the day.’
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The judges were appalled. Not even the Nazis had up to this point suggested breaching the long-established principle of the irremoveability of judges. Such a threat made them all the more amenable to the pressure that was now put on them to impose harsher sentences on offenders. In many cases, it had already come from Hitler. He had ordered the Ministry to be telephoned on some eighteen occasions since the beginning of the war to demand that criminals whom he had read about in the morning papers as having been sentenced to imprisonment should be ‘shot while trying to escape’. The conservative Minister of Justice, Franz G̈rtner, had tried to impose some sort of regular procedure on these interventions, but in January 1941 he had died, and his office had been handed over to Franz Schlegelberger, the senior civil servant in the Ministry. This made the Ministry extremely vulnerable. On 20 August 1942 Hitler finally replaced him with Otto-Georg Thierack, a hardline Nazi and President of the People’s Court; the State Secretary in the Ministry, Roland Freisler, moved over to the People’s Court to take his place.
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At the lunchtime meeting held to mark this transition, Hitler made clear his belief that justice was essentially a matter of eugenics. In war, he said, ‘it’s always the best men who then get killed. All this time, the absolute ne’er-do-well is cared for lovingly in body and spirit’ in prison. Unless something was done, there would be ‘a gradual shift in the balance of the nation’ towards inferior and criminal elements. The judge, he concluded, thus had to be ‘the bearer of racial self-preservation’.
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Thierack sprang into action right away. At the beginning of September 1942 he began issuing ‘Judges’ Letters’, outlining to the courts cases in which their alleged leniency had run into criticism from Hitler, the SS or elements in the Party, and instructing them on how to handle similar cases in future.
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He dispensed advice on general principles too. On 1 June 1943, for instance, he told them that ‘the purpose of sentencing lies in the protection of the people’s community’, and that punishment ‘in our time has to carry out the popular-hygienic task of continually cleansing the body of the race by the ruthless elimination of criminals unworthy of life’.
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In pursuit of this objective, Thierack also moved to regulate the relationship between the judicial system and the SS, which - not only at Hitler’s behest - had been taking offenders condemned to terms of imprisonment and shooting them ‘while trying to escape’, or indeed executing offenders on its own initiative before they even got to court. What the Ministry delicately termed the ‘correction of insufficient judicial sentences through special treatment by the police’ was to cease; Bormann and Himmler would refer such cases to the Ministry, along with appeals for clemency, so that Hitler’s time would no longer be taken up with such trivial matters. Local and regional Party and SS offices were ordered from now on to cease interfering in the judicial process. As a quid pro quo, Thierack agreed at his meeting with Bormann and Himmler on 18 September 1942 that ‘asocials’ would be handed over from state prisons to the SS ‘for extermination through labour’. ‘Persons in protective custody will be delivered without exception, Czechs or Germans with sentences of more than eight years on the recommendation of the Reich Minister of Justice.’
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