Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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In Bremen, where Himmler had ﬁrst got to know the leading party

ofﬁcials in May 1933, a major conﬂict erupted in November between the

police chief, Theodor Laue, and the local SA, which was notorious for its

thuggish behaviour. As a result of this disagreement, Ro

hm expelled Laue,

who was an old SA member, from the brown-shirts, whereupon Laue

sought Himmler’s support. In fact, Himmler already had an important ally

in Bremen in the shape of the chief of the local Gestapo, Erwin Schulz.

Schulz had been a member of the political police before 1933 and had

already served the SS as an informant. Having prepared the ground in

Bremen, Himmler was able to secure his appointment as commander of

the political police on 22 December, following brief negotiations with

Reich Governor Carl Ro

ver and the mayor Richard Markert.

On 5

January 1934 he was appointed commander of the political police in Ol-

denburg, of which Ro

ver was also the Reich Governor,

and between the

end of 1933 and the beginning of 1934 Himmler was equally successful in

taking over the political police in Anhalt,

Hesse,

Thuringia,

and

Saxony.

Brunswick is another case in which it appears that Himmler managed to

win over inﬂuential ofﬁcials by assigning them ranks in the SS. His appoint-

ment as chief of the political police on 27 January by the Prime Minister,

Dietrich Klagges, had the full support of the Reich Governor, Wilhelm

Loeper. Loeper had already informed Himmler in December of his wish to

be given a rank in the SS appropriate to his position; he was appointed SS-

Gruppenfu

hrer in February 1934.

Klagges was appointed SS-Gruppen-

hrer on the same day as Himmler’s appointment as chief of the political

police.

Himmler’s appointment in Brunswick was particularly important

because in the summer of 1933 there had been a major clash between

Klagges and the SD. Himmler had resolved the issue through a ‘tactical

retreat’,

and thereby avoided further tension with the Brunswick party

leadership. In April 1934 the political police in Brunswick was taken over by

the leader of the SS-Gruppe North-West and head of the Brunswick State

Police Ofﬁce, Friedrich Jeckeln, who enjoyed the conﬁdence of both

Himmler and Klagges.

The only obstacles in Himmler’s path were posed by the two tiny states of

Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe, where he came up against opposition from

the Reich Governor, Alfred Meyer. It was not until April 1934 that he

managed to take control of the political police in these states.

160 takeo ver of the political police

Himmler’s position as boss of a terror apparatus that was operating

effectively in Bavaria and also as the head of the SS, an organization that

covered the whole of Germany, enabled him to act as a counterweight to

the SA. This will have played an important part in the decision of the

various heads of the state governments to let him take over their political

police forces. The growing conﬂict with the SA was increasingly replacing

the combating of political opposition in the scale of priorities. The

Reichsfu

hrer-SS was evidently believed to be capable of dealing with the

SA and of coordinating the political police forces. At the beginning of 1934

Himmler had in fact established a ‘Central Ofﬁce’ in Munich especially for

this purpose.

It was also crucial that he never challenged the authority of

the local party bosses. On the contrary, he swore unconditional loyalty to

them.

And in a number of cases the regional leaders did indeed retain

authority, at least during the early years, over ‘their’ political police forces, as

can be shown for Baden, Brunswick, Hamburg, Saxony, and Hesse.

Himmler was not even in total control of the political police in Bavaria.

He could not prevent the Munich police chief and high-ranking SA leader

August Schneidhuber from removing control over the processing of politi-

cal offences from the political police and transferring it back to police

headquarters.

If Himmler was already intending to take over the whole of the German

police and the Third Reich’s terror apparatus, then he was successful at

concealing it. In fact there is no convincing evidence that this was his aim at

the time.

Instead, it is entirely possible that at this point he did not intend

to do more than unify the political police forces of the German states under

his command and merge them with the SS.

The struggle to control the Prussian Gestapo

Himmler’s strategy of gradually taking over as commander of the various

state political police forces would have had little political effect if he had not

succeeded in securing control of the political police in what was by far the

largest German state, Prussia. For it was only by taking personal control of

all the political police forces that he would be in a position to coordinate

them, in other words, turn them into a uniform organization and subject

them to central direction, as opposed to simply accumulating titles.

takeover of the political police 161

Prussia at this time was the scene of a particularly vicious, complex, and

opaque struggle among various factions, each of which was bent on acquir-

ing control over the apparatus of repression that was being constructed. For

it was clear to all involved that what happened in Prussia would determine

who in future would control the political police throughout the Reich. This

is not the place to deal with the details of this struggle; what is important in

this connection is how Himmler managed to exploit certain openings in

order to further his appointment as Inspector of the Secret State Police

(Gestapo).

The central ﬁgure in this power struggle was Hermann Go

ring, acting

Prussian Minister of the Interior and, since April 1933, also Prussian Prime

Minister. Go

ring did not rely on the traditional agency for controlling the

political police, namely the police department in the Prussian Interior Minis-

try, but instead appointed the leader of SS-Gruppe East, Kurt Daluege (who

during the years 1930–3 had played a major part in keeping control of the

unruly east German SA) as Commissar z.b.V. (for special assignments) within

the ministry. Although formally he had assigned him only minor responsi-

bilities, in fact Go

ring intended Daluege to play the key role within the

Prussian police apparatus.

His ofﬁcial responsibilities made him relatively

independent of SS headquarters in Munich. Thus, despite his high rank in

the SS hierarchy, Daluege was not, as one might at ﬁrst assume, Himmler’s

Trojan horse within the ministry, but rather Go

ring’s man. Indeed, in May

1933 Go

ring appointed him head of the police department in his ministry and

in September gave him command of the Prussian police.

However, Go

ring created another instrument for the special purpose of

combating political opponents. He removed the political police, which up

until then had been part of the criminal police, from the general police

organization and subordinated it to a new Secret State Police Ofﬁce (Ge-

heimes Staatspolizeiamt = Gestapa), which came under his direct control. To

head this new central state agency he appointed Rudolf Diels, who since

1931 had been responsible within the police department of the Prussian

Interior Ministry for combating communism. In fact, this continuity of

personnel was typical for this new special police department, which was

staffed mainly by ofﬁcials from the police and judiciary who had served

under Weimar. In matters concerning the political police the Gestapa had

the right to issue directives to the previous political police sections within

the criminal police departments in the Prussian districts, which were now

renamed State Police Ofﬁces (Staatspolizeistellen or Stapostellen). This

162 takeo ver of the political police

provided the foundation for the development of the Gestapo (Geheime

Staatspolizei, ‘Secret State Police’).

In practice it was to become clear that in Prussia, as in the other states led by

top Nazis who in the meantime had been appointed as provincial governors

(Oberpra

sidenten), district governors (Regierungspra

sidenten), and police chiefs,

these party functionaries would exercise considerable inﬂuence over the

regional police organizations. They resisted Go

ring’s attempts at centraliza-

tion with some measure of success.

Himmler, therefore, initially focused his

attentions on the provinces. As had been the case with the other states, he

aimed to inﬁltrate the Prussian political police by placing some of his men in

the Gestapo organization or by appointing senior Gestapo ofﬁcers to ranks

within the SS, thereby securing their loyalty to him personally.

Apart from utilizing such personal contacts, Himmler could exercise

inﬂuence above all through the auxiliary police (Hilfspolizei), which Go

ring

had established on 22 February 1933.

Within a few weeks, the 25,000 SA

men, who together with 15,000 SS and 10,000 members of the Stahlhelm

provided the bulk of the auxiliary police,

began to pose a problem. Their

thuggish and arbitrary behaviour was threatening to undermine the author-

ity of both the party and the state. In this situation Go

ring and Diels

concluded that the SS was the most suitable instrument for keeping control

of its old rival the SA, as had repeatedly been the case during the internal

party conﬂicts of the early 1930s. At least it appeared to be the lesser of two

evils. According to an edict issued by the Prussian Interior Ministry on 21

April 1933, auxiliary police duties involving the political police would in

future be conﬁned to the SS; the role of the SA auxiliary police would be

limited to assisting the general police.

This meant that the Interior Minis-

try envisaged that the political police and the SS would be amalgamated to a

certain extent, whereas the SA would have to restrict itself to duties such as

cordoning off streets, providing security for major events, and suchlike.

The fact that in June 1933 the SA chief, R o

hm, was appointed Commissar

of the auxiliary police in Prussia, whereas Himmler was appointed Com-

missar of the auxiliary political police, was a further indication of the way

things were going.

In fact Diels then informed Daluege that in future only

applicants to the Gestapo who were members of the SS would be accepted,

thereby overriding the formal provisions for Gestapo appointments.

ing gave his retrospective approval for this.

Moreover, as the commander

of the auxiliary police attached to the Gestapo, Himmler had his own liaison

ofﬁcer in the Gestapa in the shape of Untersturmfu

hrer Walter Sohst,

and

takeover of the political police 163

he and Heydrich were able to place a number of other contacts in the

Gestapo headquarters.

On 2 August 1933, in the aftermath of Hitler’s announcement of the end

of the ‘National Socialist revolution’, Go

ring dissolved the auxiliary police

and, on 1 October, Diels organized the SS auxiliaries who had been

discharged into an SS Commando Gestapo under SS-Brigadefu

hrer Max

Henze. The commando took over the notorious informal prison in Co-

lumbia House and established its base there, physically separated from

Gestapo headquarters in Prince Albrecht Palace. This provided Himmler

with a unit within the Gestapo that could operate largely independently,

and which, moreover, controlled a concentration camp that, while ofﬁcially

remaining under the authority of the state, was in fact completely subject to

the arbitrary behaviour of the SS.

On the same day Himmler dismissed

Daluege from his post as SS-Gruppenfu

hrer East, and appointed him head

of a staff to be deployed for special assignments. Daluege had become tied in

to Go

ring’s police organization, and this step had the effect of removing his

inﬂuence within the SS and, in particular, the possibility of his taking

control of the SS personnel in Berlin.

There was another unit operating independently in Berlin as auxiliary

police with the task of combating political opponents and competitors. This

was the so-called SS-Sonderkommando Berlin for special assignments,

which consisted of members of the unit that Sepp Dietrich had formed to

ensure Hitler’s personal protection and which in September 1933 was to be

transformed into the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.

Although Dietrich always

stressed his complete independence vis-a

-vis the SS Reich headquarters, in

practice this force strengthened Himmler’s position in the Reich capital.

By contrast, it soon became clear that the activities of the SD in Berlin

were not particularly helpful. Although Heydrich had moved SD headquar-

ters from Munich to Berlin following the Nazi takeover of power, in

practice his new tasks in Bavaria prevented him from operating effectively.

Moreover, the party’s intelligence service, which at this stage may have had

some thirty to forty members throughout the whole of the Reich, was still in

its infancy. Above all, however, in the summer of 1933 the SD became

involved in a serious crisis because, in the wake of its disputes with the party

leadership in Hamburg and Brunswick referred to above, it was accused by

leading party ﬁgures of interfering with the party’s internal affairs. In

response, during that same summer Heydrich moved SD headquarters

back to Munich and reorganized it.

164 takeo ver of the political police

Himmler now strengthened Heydrich’s position by promoting him in

July from chief of staff of the SD to head the service.

He also provided him

with support by negotiating a deal with Rudolf Hess in the autumn by

which in future the SD would intervene in internal party matters only with

the latter’s permission.

In return, Hess issued a party instruction on 13

November which announced that Hitler had expressly ordered that the SD

should continue to operate, thereby refuting rumours to the contrary.

Four days earlier, on 9 November 1933, Himmler had raised the SD to the

status of an Ofﬁce (Amt) within the SS and promoted Heydrich to the rank

of Brigadefu

hrer.

Finally, Heydrich restructured the SD by establishing

three operational departments—Home, Foreign, and Freemasons

—

which by the beginning of 1934 were represented in all seven of the regional

Oberabschnitte.

100

On 9 June 1934 Hess, acting in his role as the Fu

hrer’s

Deputy for party affairs, announced that in future the SD was to be the

NSDAP’s ofﬁcial intelligence service.

101

The SD was far too much involved in its own problems, however, to be

of any assistance to Himmler in Prussia. Moreover, Himmler suffered

another setback. In the autumn of 1933 the Prussian Interior Ministry

ordered the dissolution of the unauthorized SA camps. Himmler was,

however, thwarted in his attempt to ensure that the prisoners released as a

result should be handed over to the SS. Indeed, the numerous cases of

mistreatment, murder, and assaults on the local population by SS guards in

the big camps on the moors of the Emsland prompted the Interior Ministry

to replace them with police. Yet paradoxically this ultimately turned out to

work in favour of Himmler’s Prussian ambitions. By having to replace the

SS guards, the Prussian Interior Ministry had shown that its original concept

of placing the SS concentration camp guards under state supervision was

not viable. The lesson to be learnt from this episode was that one could not

use SS terror in the camps as a deterrent while at the same time ensuring

effective state supervision. Himmler’s Bavarian model, which combined the

political police and the concentration camps in the hands of the SS,

appeared preferable.

102

Himmler was able to beneﬁt from the temporary breach between Go

ring

and Diels that occurred in the autumn of 1933. Evidently prompted by

Daluege, who considered Diels a traitor, Go

ring began a move against

Diels, who promptly ﬂed to Czechoslovakia. Go

ring fairly soon realized

that he needed Diels’s help in the struggle against the SA, particularly in

view of the fact that the latter’s successor, Paul Hinkler, proved completely

takeover of the political police 165

incompetent in the post,

103

and so he persuaded him to return from exile.

However, after taking up his post again in Berlin, Diels began to seek the

support of the SD. In fact, even before his return Himmler had appointed

him an SS-Standartenfu

hrer.

104

But, in the ﬁnal analysis, what was to prove decisive for Himmler’s

success in Prussia was the power struggle between Go

ring and Reich

Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick.

105

While Go

ring reorganized the Prussian

police, Himmler had managed to some extent to inﬁltrate the political

police (Gestapo) in what was the largest German state. It was a force that

was in the process of being created but had already acquired an autonomous

status. At the same time, Frick was making considerable efforts to unify the

whole police structure throughout the Reich and establish a national police

headquarters to include the political police. Under his scheme it was unclear

how much authority over the police the federal states would retain, and it

was precisely this question that was the subject of negotiation between Frick

and Go

ring in the spring and summer of 1933.

In fact, the planned amalgamation of the Reich and Prussian Interior

Ministries provided Frick with a new opportunity to bring the Gestapo

under his control.

106

ring tried to prevent this from happening with the

Second Gestapo Law of 30 November 1933 , by removing the Gestapo from

the control of the Prussian Interior Ministry, of which he was the acting

head, and subordinating it to himself in his role as Prussian Prime Minis-

ter.

107

As a result, Diels, who now received the title of Inspector of the

Gestapo, became the head of an agency that was not only (as a result of the

law of April 1933) detached from the general police organization but was no

longer subject to the authority of a departmental minister. Moreover, in

March 1934 Go

ring completely removed the regional Gestapo ofﬁces from

the rest of the police organization in Prussia.

108

The substantial autonomy

attained by the political police in what was the largest German state, and the

fact that it was no longer subject to effective control, must have encouraged

the ambitious Himmler to regard it as an ideal base for his future operations.

ring was to prove the key to achieving his goal.

As early as the end of 1933 Himmler had begun to distance himself from

his nominal superior, Ro

hm, and to move closer to Go

ring. At the begin-

ning of 1934 he began to acquire compromising material on Diels from

various sources, including Ludwig Grauert, the state secretary in the Prus-

sian Interior Ministry, and Diels’s colleague Hans Gisevius, but also from

Nazi ﬁgures within the police apparatus (Daluege and Artur Nebe, an

166 takeo ver of the political police

ofﬁcial within the Gestapa), as well as from the Berlin SD-Oberabschnitt

East which had been reactivated under Heydrich’s close associate Hermann

Behrends.

109

While a few weeks earlier Himmler had supported Diels

against Go

ring, he now plotted to remove the Gestapo chief.

In April 1934 Frick and Go

ring ﬁnally reached a compromise: Frick took

over the Prussian Interior Ministry in addition to his role as Reich Interior

Minister, thereby taking control of by far the largest police organization in

the Reich (which was still headed by Daluege). He now sought to take over

all the police forces in the rest of the Reich, which was liable to bring him

into a direct confrontation with Himmler.

From the beginning of 1934 Frick and Go

ring had been trying to reduce

the use of protective custody.

110

Among other things, they had used a

meeting of the Reich Governors in March to try to achieve this.

111

response, the Reich Governor of Bavaria, von Epp, and its Minister of

Justice, Hans Frank, had taken further steps to cut down on protective

custody but had met with opposition from the Interior Minister, Adolf

Wagner, who supported Himmler.

112

In April Go

ring and Frick reached

agreement on the introduction of uniform regulations for the use of protec-

tive custody.

113

Frick’s directive implementing the agreement stated that

the imposition of protective custody was the responsibility of the ‘highest

state authority’ (that is, the Prussian Gestapa or the Bavarian political

police). This meant that nobody could be taken into protective custody in

Prussia without Go

ring’s approval.

After this decisive safeguard had been put in place, both Frick and Go

ring

believed they could risk handing over the political police throughout the

Reich, including Prussia, to Himmler. It was not intended that Himmler

should amalgamate the political police departments of the various states into

a single organization, but rather that he should act as their combined leader.

In this way it was assumed that his political position could be reduced to

an acceptable level. This was, of course, a very formalistic approach, and

it would not take Himmler long to transform his personal position of

leadership into a real power base. Go

ring had insisted that Himmler should

submit to him all important incoming and outgoing correspondence. But

this turned out to be an inadequate means of controlling him, despite

Himmler’s eager promise to fulﬁl the request. It was naive to believe that

Himmler could be appointed to a position of authority with a suitable

organization at his command and then somehow be effectively supervised

from outside.

114

takeover of the political police 167

Thus Himmler’s success in Prussia, which was to smooth his path to the

takeover of the political police throughout the Reich, was due in part to his

tactic of inﬁltration and of integrating key ﬁgures into the SS, in part to his

diplomatic skills and his correct assessment of the interests and weaknesses of

his opponents, in part to his ability to appear to subordinate himself to

ring, and, last but not least, to the fact that he did not reveal any further

ambitions as far as the police were concerned. It appears that Himmler was

trusted to provide the necessary coordination of the various police forces

without using this function as a springboard to an unlimited expansion of his

power.

All in all, Himmler had cleverly succeeded in utilizing the power strug-

gles of his rivals for his own ends. The decisive factor was the threat the SA

had either appeared to, or actually did, pose and which prompted Frick and

ring to end their dispute and include Himmler in their compromise

settlement by granting him what appeared to be an appropriate post. An

additional point was the fact that the leading Nazi politicians in the states

preferred to see the political police in Himmler’s hands rather than in

Frick’s, who, it was believed, would centralize it and integrate it once

more into the general police organization in the form of a Reich political

police force.

On 10 April 1934 Himmler was appointed ‘Inspector of the Secret State

Police in Prussia’. The intention was that Heydrich, acting as Himmler’s

deputy, should take over as head of the Secret Political Police Ofﬁce

(Gestapa), while Go

ring continued to remain ofﬁcially head of the Secret

State Police (Gestapo).

115

While Himmler was focusing on securing his appointment as head of the

political police departments of the federal states, he found himself con-

fronted by a serious challenge created by the rapid expansion of the SS

following the Nazi takeover of power. New members had poured into the

SS in the weeks after 30 January 1933. In the spring of 1933 the number of

SS members had already increased to 100,000, and after a temporary ban on

the admission of new members between April and November 1933, the

organization had more than doubled in size by the spring of the following

year. Himmler later described this expansion as the ‘most serious crisis that

the SS has ever experienced’; it took three or four years to sort out the

negative repercussions.

116

By 1935, according to his calculations, 60,000

members of the SS had had to be excluded.

117

168 takeo ver of the political police

However, the number of sponsoring members or patrons also increased

rapidly: from 13,217 to 167,272. These ‘sponsors’ ( fo

rdernde Mitglieder [FM])

were effectively honorary members, usually well-off individuals who paid

regular contributions to the SS either out of sympathy or under intimida-

tion. During the following year it had grown to 342,492, although subse-

quently there was a slight reduction, in particular on account of the ban on

meetings issued in June 1934, which also banned the recruitment of patrons.

Although the SS was ﬁnancing itself predominantly from party subsidies (in

reality taxes) by 1934 at the latest, the ‘FM’ funds’ represented a signiﬁcant

sum. They increased from 204,000 Reich marks in 1932 to RM 4,285,000 in

1933 and RM 6,972,000 in 1934.

118

In May 1933 Himmler had moved his command staff from Munich to

Berlin. During these months the number of Standarten was doubled from

50 to 100; in the winter of 1933–4 Himmler introduced Oberabschnitte or

regions, which replaced the previous combination of SS-Abschnitte (dis-

tricts) into Gruppen (groups). The fact that in February 1934 Himmler

moved his staff back to Munich

119

indicates what a turbulent life the

Reichsfu

hrer-SS was leading during these months. On his return to Munich

he restructured the SS headquarters, which in future consisted of three

agencies: the SS Ofﬁce (Amt) for general management, the SD Ofﬁce,

and the R ace and Settlement Ofﬁce, as well as his personal staff.

120

It was also in February 1934 that Himmler appointed Oswald Pohl,

a former naval paymaster born in 1892, as the new head of the SS adminis-

tration. Himmler had been seeking a reliable and experienced administrator.

Pohl’s two predecessors, Paul Weickert and Gerhard Schneider, had been

dismissed for embezzlement and excluded from the SS. Since the SS (as part

of the SA) was receiving public subsidies from 1933 onwards and had to

account for the use of this money, Himmler needed an expert who was

familiar with the budgetary regulations of the public sector.

121

Himmler had discussed with Pohl the possibility of his joining the SS

leadership for the ﬁrst time in May 1933 in Kiel. Two days after this meeting

Pohl wrote Himmler a letter in which he explained his reasons for con-

templating a change of career. According to Pohl, while he enjoyed being

in the Navy, ‘my professional life does not provide me with intellectual

satisfaction or an outlet for my creative urges and my mania for work. I want

to work and I can work until I collapse.’

122

Himmler liked him, and after a

long interval, which was caused by the formalities of Pohl’s departure from

takeover of the political police 169