Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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On 12 March acting police chief Heinrich Himmler gave a press confer-

ence, at which he commented on the mass arrests that he had ordered

during the preceding days:

I have made quite extensive use of protective custody [ . . . ] I felt compelled to do

this because in many parts of the city there has been so much agitation that it has

been impossible for me to guarantee the safety of those particular individuals who

have provoked it. I must emphasize one point in particular: for us a citizen of the

Jewish faith is just as much a citizen as someone who is not of the Jewish faith and

his life and property are subject to the same protection. We make no distinction in

this respect.

Apart from that, he had decided to arrest all the leaders and functionaries of

the Communist Party (KPD) and of the Reichsbanner and the Iron Front

(i.e. the paramilitary units of the democratic parties and the trades unions).

On 15 March, six days after Himmler’s appointment as acting Munich

police chief, Wagner appointed him to be ‘political adviser to the Interior

Ministry’, thereby giving him effective responsibility for the political police

throughout the state.

Before the month was out Himmler had been

appointed commander of the Bavarian auxiliary political police. This ap-

pointment was in his capacity as Reichsfu

hrer-SS, which meant that he

could now appoint SS members to be auxiliary policemen; initially, a

maximum complement of 1,020 was envisaged.

On 1 April he was

ofﬁcially appo inted ‘Commander of the Bavarian Political Police’. Himm-

ler n ow controlled the political police, the auxiliary political police, and

‘tho se concentration camps that al ready exist and those that are still to be

established’ throughout the state of Bavaria.

Ten days later—in the me an-

time, Himmler had given up his post as Munich police chief to SA-

Obergruppenfu

hrer August Schneidhuber

—he was given respo nsibility

for all matters rela ting to protective custody.

As a result of these appointments and assignments of responsibility

Himmler had accumulated a considerable amount of power within a very

short period of time. He was in charge of a special police force that had been

removed from the regular police structure. It was tightly organized, entirely

focused on combating political opponents, and permitted to deploy the SS

within its recently assigned area of responsibilities. He could arbitrarily put

people in protective custody in his concentration camps, who would then

be indeﬁnitely subject to his whim. Above all, as commander of the political

police—and this was certainly one reason for his appointment—Himmler

150 takeo ver of the political police

represented an effective counterweight to the special commissars whom

hm had appointed from the ranks of the SA in order to control the

Bavarian administration. While it was true that the special commissars had

police responsibilities, for which they had the SA auxiliary police at their

disposal, Himmler could give directives to the SA special commissars in

matters concerning the political police.

On 15 March the political police had already begun to establish a camp

for prisoners in protective custody in the grounds of an old gunpowder

factory in the town of Dachau near Munich.

Himmler announced the

measure on 20 March, justifying it on the grounds of ‘state security’. No

attention would be paid to ‘petty objections’, and there were plans for an

establishment of 5,000 prisoners. Himmler announced brashly that enquiries

to police headquarters about the length of protective custody simply held up

the police unnecessarily. The result was that ‘every enquiry would merely

mean that the prisoner would have to spend an extra day in protective

custody’.

Initially the Dachau camp was guarded by a squad of Munich police.

However, acting in his capacity as head of the Bavarian auxiliary political

police, on 2 April Himmler ordered the camp to be handed over to the SS.

With this move Himmler had wangled for the SS a task that ofﬁcially came

under the remit of, and was ﬁnanced by, the state. On 11 April the Munich

police left the camp in which there were at the time over 200 prisoners.

Immediately after taking over the camp the SS indulged in an orgy of

violence which cost four Jewish prisoners their lives. There were further

murders, with prisoners either dying from mistreatment or being shot.

Subsequent investigations revealed that the camp commandant, Hilmar

ckerle, had issued ‘special regulations’, according to which ‘martial law’

was to prevail in the camp. Indeed, there was a camp court over which he

presided and which could even pass death sentences.

The indescribable

conditions existing in Dachau not only became widely known,

but led to

the Munich prosecutor’s ofﬁce becoming involved. In the course of his

investigations the public prosecutor, Wintersberger, demanded from

Himmler an explanation for four unaccountable deaths, and showed him,

among other things, photographs of the disﬁgured corpses. The investiga-

tions came to nothing, but the affair did produce sufﬁcient pressure to

prompt von Epp to call a meeting attended by, among others, the Bavarian

Ministers of Justice and the Interior, at which Himmler was obliged to agree

to replace Wa

ckerle as commandant of Dachau.

takeover of the political police 151

Himmler found a candidate to succeed him who at this moment was at

the lowest point of his life, and who gratefully seized the chance offered him

to make a new start. This was Theodor Eicke, the later Inspector of

Concentration Camps and leader of the SS-Death’s Head military units

formed from concentration camp guards.

The appointment of Eicke, one

of the ﬁrst important ones made by Himmler following the seizure of

power, is a classic example of his personnel policy. It involved recruiting

failures who were turned into compliant subordinates by a mixture of strict

discipline, gestures of concern for their welfare, and also the appearance of

trust, as these offenders were assigned tasks that they had to carry out largely

independently.

Born in 1892, Eicke was a military paymaster who, after his discharge

from military service, had tried unsuccessfully to join the police several

times and had ﬁnally ended up in charge of security at the IG Farben plant in

Ludwigshafen. Having joined the party in 1928,in1930 he was given the

job of establishing the SS in Ludwigshafen, a task that resulted in his

becoming an SS-Standartenfu

hrer the following year. In 1932 he was

discovered constructing a bomb and arrested; IG Farben dismissed him

without notice. According to his own account, the affair was the result of a

trap set for him by the party’s Palatinate Gau, with which he was permanently

at odds, and this explanation is not totally implausible. Be that as it may, he

was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. During a period of prison-leave

granted on health grounds, he received an order from Himmler to escape to

Italy. During his journey there he met the Reichsfu

hrer in Munich, who

assured him of his goodwill and support and promoted him to the rank of

Oberfu

hrer.

In February 1933 Eicke returned to Germany, assuming that under the

new regime his punishment would be suspended. Shortly afterwards he

once more became involved in serious internal party conﬂict. Himmler

ordered him to come to Munich and gave him a dressing down on account

of his behaviour. According to Eicke, he made him promise in future not to

become involved in political matters or in those involving the SS.

How-

ever, on 21 March Eicke was arrested once more because he was considered

guilty, possibly unjustly, of having been involved in an unauthorized action

by the Ludwigshafen SS which had led to a confrontation with the police.

After going on hunger strike he was transferred to a mental hospital in

rzburg, whereupon Himmler removed him from the list of the SS

(a milder form of discharge than dismissal), on the grounds of his having

152 takeo ver of the political police

broken his word of honour, although the Reichsfu

hrer acknowledged his

‘poor health and nervous breakdown’ as mitigating circumstances.

During this period Eicke sent several letters appealing to Himmler,

including one of eighteen sides justifying his position. The director of the

clinic in which Eicke was held, Werner Heyde, told Himmler that in his

view Eicke was not mentally unbalanced (a few years later Heyde was to

provide Eicke, who was by then Inspector of Concentration Camps, with

hereditary-biological assessments, and later on played a leading role in the

‘euthanasia’ murders).

Himmler responded by supporting Eicke’s family

with a gift of 200 Reich marks and requested Heyde to release Eicke from

the hospital at Whitsun. He was intending ‘to employ him in some way, if

possible in a state post’.

By appointing Eicke to be commandant of Dachau camp on 26 June,

Himmler was effectively deploying someone as his tool who owed his

rehabilitation entirely to him. Eicke was fully aware of the fact: ‘If my

hrer had not achieved power in Germany,’ he wrote to Himmler in

November 1933 , ‘I would have spent all my life going to prison and would

never have been able to take up public ofﬁce.’

Eicke did not disappoint Himmler. Within a short time he had developed

a type of regime in Dachau that differed markedly from that in the other

concentration camps during the early Nazi years: the so-called Dachau

model.

Among the essential elements of this system were: the sealing off

of the camp from the outside world, in particular the determination to

prevent escapes; the separation of the guards from the commandant’s ofﬁce;

the introduction of work details for the prisoners; systematized use of force

through the introduction of a uniform set of punishments, the ‘Disciplinary

and Punishment Code’;

as well as strict discipline for the guards, who

were subject to a speciﬁc disciplinary code.

The aim of creating the

impression that the old arbitrary regime had now been replaced by one

that was strict but nevertheless bound by certain rules was an additional

aspect of this new system. In actual fact the camp was ruled by arbitrary

terror; the prisoners lived in continual fear for their lives. Eicke was

concerned above all to prevent arbitrary murders by the guards; the right

to kill prisoners should be conﬁned solely to the camp authorities.

The ‘Disciplinary and Punishment Code’ made it clear that within the

camp any behaviour by a prisoner could be construed as encouragement to

protest or mutiny, in other words, as a crime that carried the death penalty.

It stated that anyone who ‘makes political statements designed to encourage

takeover of the political police 153

protest, or makes provocative speeches’, anyone who ‘collects, receives,

buries, or passes on by word of mouth or in any other way information,

whether true or false, designed for hostile propaganda, anyone who en-

courages others to ﬂee or to commit a crime shall be hanged as an agitator by

right of revolutionary law’. A prisoner who physically attacked a guard,

encouraged another to mutiny, or ‘who during a march or during work

yells, shouts, agitates or holds speeches’ would be ‘shot on the spot as a

mutineer’ or hanged. Whereas under Eicke’s predecessor there had been

‘martial law’, now the decision over life and death was no longer bound by a

formal process, and in fact murders did not cease. However, as a result of the

camp being sealed off, the improved discipline of the guards, and the

systematization of terror, the murder cases could be more easily concealed,

so that the judiciary could not ﬁnd any justiﬁcation for intervening. In

general the murders were portrayed as suicide or as the prisoner having been

shot while trying to escape.

The commander of the political police, Heinrich Himmler, on whose

authority the ‘Disciplinary and Punishment Code’ was explicitly based, was

responsible for implementing this process of concealment. For it was

Himmler who was obliged to inform the Bavarian Interior Ministry about

the deaths in Dachau, and who conﬁrmed the falsiﬁed accounts of suicide or

‘attempts at ﬂight’.

For this reason alone it is clear that Himmler was aware

of the excesses and murders in Dachau. In other words, he knew that the

image projected to the outside world of Dachau as a ‘model camp’ was a

complete distortion of the facts. Himmler visited the camp on a number of

occasions. In August 1933 Ro

hm joined him in inaugurating a memorial

stone in memory of Horst Wessel, ‘donated’ by the prisoners,

and in

January 1934, on the occasion of a party meeting, he invited the Reich Party

leaders and the Gauleiters to look round the camp. In the course of these

visits he was reassured that the camp authorities were capable of effectively

maintaining the illusion that this was a normal and well-regulated prison

camp. In March 1934 Himmler received a letter from the Bavarian Prime

Minister, Ludwig Siebert, who had recently visited Dachau, in which he

was explicitly congratulated on the conditions in this ‘model prison camp’.

The letter was published in the German press.

Nevertheless, in December 1933 a series of unexplained deaths in Dachau

was the subject of discussion at a meeting of the Bavarian cabinet. The

cabinet had already discussed Himmler’s performance as commander of the

political police on a number of occasions.

At this meeting R eich Governor

154 takeo ver of the political police

von Epp decided that the investigations into the deaths should not be

shelved, as requested by Interior Minister Wagner, acting for Himmler,

but instead should be pursued with the full rigour of the law.

Thereupon

Himmler appealed to Ro

hm for support. Ro

hm informed the civil servant in

the Ministry of Justice assigned to the political police to deal with the matter

that he intended to discuss the affair with Hitler.

hm and Himmler

adopted delaying tactics which in the end proved successful. Nothing

happened before the prosecutor involved in the case was transferred in the

summer of 1934, and his successor then closed the case. In effect, Dachau

had become terra incognita for the judiciary.

During the ﬁrst months of 1933 it was above all communists and Social

Democrats who were arrested, several thousand people in all.

In June

1933, however, Himmler launched a special action directed against the

conservative Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), which involved the arrest of

all the party’s Reichstag and state parliamentary deputies with the exception

of Count Eugen von Quadt, Economics Minister in the state government,

and which was designed to force the party to dissolve itself.

After this had

occurred and the BVP functionaries had been released, in August 1933 there

were exactly 3,965 persons in protective custody in Bavaria, 2,420 of them

in Dachau. Faced with von Epp’s demand that he curb the use of protective

custody, Himmler continually reduced the numbers. In June 1934 there

were 2,204, of whom 1,517 were in Dachau camp.

Himmler had needed only a year in which to construct a closed system

consisting of the political police, the SS deployed as auxiliaries, and Dachau

concentration camp, which he was able to seal off from any interference by

the Bavarian state authorities. Towards the end of this year, a year that had

been so successful for him, he began to focus on the political police in the

other German states. To begin with, however, he cleverly gave a wide berth

to the biggest state, Prussia, where the political police was directly subordi-

nate to its powerful Prime Minister, Hermann Go

ring.

From state to state

Considering his clumsy behaviour in his previous party posts, Himmler

displayed a surprising degree of diplomatic and political skill in the way in

which he approached the expansion of his power basis outside Bavaria. In

particular, his strategy of placing people he could trust in key positions or

takeover of the political police 155

winning the loyalty of such persons by conferring on them SS rank proved

successful. Himmler succeeded in creating the impression among the re-

gional party bosses that by transferring the political police to the SS, which

took the form of appointing Himmler as commander of the political police

in the individual states, they were not giving up a decisive power base but

rather securing the support of the SS. There was, however, another reason

why the Nazi bosses in the federal states were so amenable to Himmler,

namely, the continuing lack of discipline of the SA, even after Hitler had

ofﬁcially declared an end to the revolution in June 1933. Its demand for a

‘second revolution’, and the tensions with the political wing of the NSDAP

that resulted from it, persuaded the new rulers in the states that it was in

their interest to look for an ally. The fact that in recent years the SS had

acquired the reputation of being a disciplined elite organization that was

invariably loyal to the party leadership and at the same time completely

ruthless in dealing with the enemies of Nazism played an important part in

their decision. Its recent ‘successes’ in dealing with its opponents could be

observed in the way Himmler had handled matters in Bavaria.

The fact

that the SS had an organization that spanned the Reich and operated

relatively effectively with its own intelligence service, the SD (Sicherheits-

dienst), was an additional point in its favour. The SD provided Himmler

with an intelligence operation controlling local informants and, by recruit-

ing members of the political police into the SD, he created his own

network. In fact, as we shall see, the SD was temporarily involved in a crisis

in the summer of 1933. However, by the autumn, when Himmler began to

be appointed chief of the political police in the various states, his intelli-

gence service had begun to restore its position.

Himmler also beneﬁted from the fact that in March 1933 the SS was in a

position to establish, albeit only to a li mited extent, armed units based in

barracks. The ﬁrst of these was a special ‘staff guard’ for the Fu

hrer’s

personal protection. This was established on 17 March on Hitler’s orders

by th e head of his per sonal bodyguard, Sepp Dietrich, who had played an

important role in the development of the SS in both no rth and south

Germany. The unit, consisting of 120 men, was composed of members of

the SA and SS and wore SS uniform. In the spring of 1933 it was assigned to

the Prussian state police as an auxiliary police unit, renamed ‘Sonderkom-

mando Berlin z.b.V.’ (for special assignments), and considerabl y enlarged.

The Wehrmacht took over the military training of what had now become

an 800-st rong force. This was effectively a small private army which had

156 takeo ver of the political police

been created unconstitutionally and illegally, made solely responsible to the

hrer, and renamed ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ ( ‘Adolf Hitler’s bod y-

guard’) during the party ra lly in September. Its special position was under-

lined when, on 9 November, it swore allegia nce to Hitle r personally.

Although Dietrich always emphas ized the independence of his force from

the Reich leadership of the SS, the Sonderkommando z.b.V. was not only

used to protect the dictator but was also deployed to co mbat political

opponents, and thereby con tribute d towards strengthening th e position

of the SS and its Reichsfu

hrer in the power strugg le for contro l of the

instruments of repression in the Reich capital.

In the spring of 1934, in view of the impending conﬂict with the SA,

Himmler succeeded in effectively integrating the force into the SS hier-

archy.

In 1933 and 1934 further armed ‘political units’ were created on

the initiative of the SS-Oberabschnitte in Munich, Ellwangen, Arolsen,

Hamburg, and Wolterdingen.

The Free and Hansa City of Hamburg was the ﬁrst state to offer to hand

over its political police to Himmler. The details of how this happened

provide remarkable insights into his tactics.

During the course of their

seizure of power in Hamburg the Nazis had been unsuccessful in establish-

ing a uniform apparatus of repression. Indeed, the opposite was true. As in

many other places, there was strong rivalry among various individuals and

cliques for control of the terror being exercised against political opponents.

Control over the political police, which had been removed from the general

police organization, changed hands several times. In addition, there was a

Commando z.b.V. directly subordinate to the head of the uniformed police,

which had been strengthened by SA auxiliary police, and which carried out

arrests and raids to a large extent independently. It was notorious for its

numerous illegal acts and bloody excesses. Political opponents were held in

two camps, which were subordinate to the judiciary or rather the regular

police. The Hamburg SD had been effectively neutralized by the Gauleiter,

Karl Kaufmann.

However, Himmler had a good relationship with Gauleiter Kaufmann;

they had known each other since 1927 and used the familiar ‘du’ form of

address. In 1933 Himmler made several visits to Hamburg, not only in order

to strengthen his ties with Kaufmann but also presumably to make further

contacts. Thus, from the start he had supported the appointment of Carl

Vincent Krogmann as the senior mayor of Hamburg,

and some time

takeover of the political police 157

during the summer of 1933 he offered Hans Nieland, who had been acting

police chief since March 1933 and then became a senator, a high SS rank.

After Nieland moved to his Senate post he was replaced as police chief in

May 1933 by Wilhelm Boltz, the leader of the Hamburg Naval SA. Boltz,

who had the reputation within the SA of being elitist and ostentatiously

distanced himself from the proletarian behaviour of the other brown-shirts,

was another of Himmler’s long-standing acquaintances.

More important, however, was the fact that in October the Nazi leader-

ship in Hamburg decided to appoint Bruno Streckenbach as chief of the

political police. He was a member of the SS and another of Himmler’s

intimates.

Gauleiter Kaufmann received the rank of SS-Oberfu

hrer,

and

his close associate, Georg Friedrich Ahrens, was admitted to the SS as a

Standartenfu

hrer and made head of the local SD.

Streckenbach was also

admitted to the SD.

As a result of these appointments, such a close-knit

relationship between party leadership and SS had been established in Ham-

burg that the local party leadership could assume that the formal takeover of

the political police by the SS on 24 November 1933 did not involve ceding

any authority in this important area. Indeed, from now on the use of SS

personnel for tasks of the local political police would be covered by the

highest authority of the SS.

One of Streckenbach’s ﬁrst acts as Hamburg police chief was an ofﬁcial

trip to Munich to study the Bavarian model.

It did not take him long to

apply the example of a uniform system of repression developed there to

Hamburg. Fuhlsbu

ttel prison, where political prisoners were incarcerated

and where an SS unit imposed a frightful regime of sadistic brutality, was

subordinated to the political police. The ﬁnal responsibilities remaining

with the prison authorities were removed in the summer of 1934.

Himmler had achieved his goal through a combination of building up

personal contacts, the wooing of important party ﬁgures by assigning them

high SS ranks, and the targeted placing of SS members in key positions. He

had even made use of the undisciplined behaviour of individual SS men or

of whole units (as with the Hamburg SD or the SS Sturm deployed in

Fuhlsbu

ttel) to create the impression that it was through his personal

intervention and his appointment of the right people that ‘orderly condi-

tions’ had been restored.

During these decisive months Himmler was continually on the move

in order to ﬁnd out what was going on in the various state capitals.

In December 1933, a few weeks after his success in Hamburg, he was

158 takeo ver of the political police

appointed political police chief in Lu

beck and Mecklenburg. The exact

circumstances of his appointment are not entirely clear. However, the

assignment of the rank of SS-Brigadefu

hrer to Friedrich Hildebrandt, the

Reich Governor of the two states, in November 1933, together with the fact

that Ludwig Obdach, who took over the Mecklenburg political police in

November, had been received into the SS shortly beforehand, suggest that

Himmler had followed the same tactics in these two northern states as he

had in Hamburg.

In Wu

rttemberg

Himmler had managed to persuade the Reich Gover-

nor, Wilhelm Murr, of the need to maintain a section of the SS auxiliary

police as an armed force to be deployed for political purposes, in other

words, as an armed unit housed in barracks. The fact that the Reich had

promised to pay for this played a decisive part in Murr’s decision.

The

presence of this unit provided Himmler with an important power base in

rttemberg. His contact man there was Walter Stahlecker, who had been

appointed deputy political police chief in May 1933. However, in Novem-

ber he was transferred because he was permanently at odds with his superior,

Hermann Mattheiss, who was a strong supporter of the SA.

On 9 December 1933 Himmler was appointed commander of the politi-

cal police in Wu

rttemberg. The decisive reason for this is likely to have

been his good relationship with Reich Governor Murr and the latter’s desire

to rationalize the expensive apparatus of the political police.

The fact that,

from autumn 1933 onwards, the SS-Oberabschnitt South-West was being

run by a dynamic individual based in Stuttgart, in the shape of Werner Best,

is also likely to have played a role.

However, Himmler was able to secure

complete control only in May 1934, when Stahlecker replaced his old boss,

Mattheiss, as chief of the political police. Mattheiss was to fall victim to the

so-called Ro

hm putsch on 30 June 1934; Stahlecker made his career in the

security police, and in 1941 was appointed commander of Einsatzgruppe A

operating in the Baltic states. Murr was granted the rank of SS-Gruppen-

hrer on 9 September 1934.

On 18 December 1933 Himmler took over the political police in Baden.

This move was supported not only by Hess in the name of Hitler, but also by

the Gauleiter of Baden, Robert Wagner, and by the Baden Interior Minister,

Karl Pﬂaumer, who was a member of the SS. Both of these men appear to

have assumed that this would strengthen the position of the Baden political

police vis-a

-vis attempts by the Reich government to take it over.

takeover of the political police 159