Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

From Inspector of

the Prussian Gestapo to Chief

of the German Police

t was to take until the autumn of 1935 before Himmler had secured

control over the whole of the German police. During this second stage of

his accretion of power he beneﬁted from the relatively unstable situation in

which the Nazi regime found itself at this time.

In the ﬁrst place, there was the international situation. As a result of the

abortive putsch in Austria, Germany had provoked the enmity of Mussolini,

and the announcement of the introduction of national military service in

March 1935, as well as the military occupation of the Rhineland the

following year, both of which were clear breaches of the Versailles treaty,

inevitably prompted fears of foreign intervention. And yet the Third Reich

was not yet prepared for such conﬂicts. In addition, there were domestic

uncertainties. The year 1935 saw the regime involved in serious conﬂicts

with conservative elements and with the churches and, moreover, the

communist underground movement was still active. Thus, the Nazi leader-

ship was concerned that its ambitious foreign-policy plans could be torpe-

doed by a collapse of the ‘home front’. The ‘1918 complex’, the fear of a

‘stab in the back’, was deeply rooted.

It was against this background that, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing,

Himmler was able to succeed in pushing through his policy of establishing

a uniform and permanent terror system that was outside the law and

covered the whole of the Reich. Himmler operated at various levels. In

the ﬁrst place, he built up the armed SS units; secondly, he brought the

whole of the concentration camp system under his control and uniﬁed it;

thirdly, he strengthened and uniﬁed the Gestapo and introduced new

elements into the programme for combating political enemies; fourthly, he

developed this programme into a comprehensive scheme for providing a

‘general preventive anti-subversion system’ (Generalprevention) covering the

whole of society, thereby persuading Hitler to appoint him Chief of the

German Police.

Since the SS continued to grow and its tasks continued to expand, it

became necessary to carry out various organizational changes, and in fact,

with his order of 14 December 1934, Himmler carried out a complete

reorganization of the SS. In future the SS was divided into three sections:

the SS-Verfu

gungstruppe, consisting of the armed political squads including

the Leibstandarte; the SS concentration camp guards; and the General SS, to

which all other members of the SS belonged.

The militarized SS

The deployment of armed SS units to neutralize the SA leadership on 30

June 1934 had been in the interests of the Reichswehr leadership and had

met with their approval. A further, albeit limited, expansion of the number

of these units had also met with the approval of the military, provided that

the monopoly of the Reichswehr as the ‘nation’s sole bearer of arms’ was not

seriously threatened. Thus, on 24 September 1934 the Reichswehr Ministry

issued guidelines for the SS-Verfu

gungstruppe with reference to an order

from Hitler. These agreed to the establishment of armed units—three

regiments and an intelligence section—although initially only one battalion

(the Leibstandarte) was to be created. Additional units with the aim of

establishing a full division were established, but signiﬁcantly only with the

permission of the Reichswehr Ministry.

The edict demonstrates the Wehrmacht’s intention of keeping the mili-

tary ambitions of the SS within bounds. Basically, the SS was to be unarmed;

the establishment of armed SS units was to be an exception and was

intended to enable the SS to carry out certain domestic political tasks that

the Fu

hrer might assign to it. The force would be under the command of

the Reichsfu

hrer-SS; in wartime it would be at the disposal of the Wehr-

macht.

The Wehrmacht endeavoured to restrict the training of the SS units

and their wartime mobilization to such an extent that in any future war they

would be able to play only a subordinate military role.

from inspector to chief of police 181

However, of the total of three leadership academies that were planned,

two were envisaged as ofﬁcer academies, each with 250 training places. And

the number of ofﬁcer recruits to be trained in eight-month courses far

exceeded the requirements of the Verfu

gungstruppe as laid down in the

edict of 24 September.

If one also takes into account the fact that Himmler

requested the Wehrmacht to give priority in its conscription programme to

SS members who had not yet served in the armed services, and his declared

intention of accepting only men into the SS who had done their military

service, then it begins to become clear that in the long term Himmler

wished to build up the General SS into a reserve troop for a much larger

SS army.

Himmler tried to defuse immediate concerns that the Wehr-

macht’s monopoly of arms might be being undermined in private talks with

the Reichswehr Minister, Werner von Blomberg, and his Chief of Staff,

Ludwig Beck, which took place in October 1934.

Himmler insisted that

the SS was not pursuing military goals like the SA; it was not intended to

develop into a ‘military organization alongside the Wehrmacht’. The SS’s

military training and organization were simply intended to underline its elite

character. It is clear from the surviving records of the army leadership that

these statements met with disbelief.

Beck’s guidelines for the cooperation of the army with the SS dated 18

December 1934 show that the Reichswehr leadership was trying as far as

possible to establish control over the SS units. Thus, although it permitted

the creation of two further units (Sappers and Intelligence), Himmler’s

pressing demand for the SS to have its own artillery was refused. In other

words, the creation of a fully equipped division was to be delayed for as long

as possible. And initially this negotiating strategy worked.

On 2 February

1935 Hitler decided that the Verfu

gungstruppe should be expanded and

equipped to full division strength only in time of war.

The new tasks and the reorganization involved considerably more work

for SS headquarters. In January 1935, therefore, Himmler raised the three

departments that he had established the previous year (SS Ofﬁce, SD Ofﬁce,

and Race and Settlement Ofﬁce) to the rank of Main Ofﬁces. The ‘Staff of

the Reichsfu

hrer-SS’ remained as his personal instrument for exercising

leadership.

On 1 June 1935, a few months after this reorganization,

Himmler appointed Oswald Pohl, the head of the Administration ofﬁce

within the SD Main Ofﬁce, to be ‘Head of the SS Administration’. This

meant that Pohl took over the supervision of the administrative department

of the SD Main Ofﬁce as well as that of the Race and Settlement Main

182 from inspector to chief of police

Ofﬁce in addition to his existing job. In later years Pohl was to develop these

responsibilities into a position of real power.

However, Himmler’s main focus during this period was on his struggle to

retain and extend his control over the concentration camp system and the

German police.

The centralization and uniﬁcation of the

concentration camp system

In May 1934, immediately after his appointment as Inspector of the Gestapa,

Himmler had assigned the Dachau commandant, Eicke, the task of reorga-

nizing the state concentration camps in Prussia. Even before the end of the

month, Eicke had taken over the Lichtenburg camp in the Prussian prov-

ince of Saxony and begun to reorganize it along the lines of Dachau. On 20

June he was ofﬁcially appointed Inspector of Concentration Camps. Al-

though he was formally subordinated to the SS Ofﬁce, in practice he

reported directly to Himmler.

At the beginning of July 1934 Eicke, who had played a leading role in the

murders of 30 June, took over the Oranienburg camp, which was under the

authority of the SA, and closed it. A number of smaller camps were also

closed.

Following on from this, he reorganized the Esterwegen camp,

which Himmler had already taken over ‘personally’ on 20 June, along the

lines of Dachau, replacing the SA guards with SS.

He followed the same

course of action with the Sachsenburg camp in the federal state of Saxony,

which was taken over in August.

Columbia House in Berlin, the ‘house

prison’ of the Gestapa, which was run by an SS squad, was transferred to him

in December 1934, and the small Sulza camp in Thuringia in April 1936.

During 1935 Himmler was exceptionally successful, as will be shown in

the next section, in countering all the attacks by the Interior and Justice

Ministers on the brutal way in which protective custody was carried out in

the camps. In the course of these disputes Himmler persuaded Hitler on 20

June to transform the concentration camp guards into a military force and to

ﬁnance the camps and guards with Reich funds.

This meant that the ﬁrst

stage in the reorganization of the camps had been completed by mid-1935.

At the same time, the number of prisoners had reached its lowest-ever level

of around 3, 000.

from inspector to chief of police 183

The self-conﬁdent Gestapo chief

On 11 October 1934 Himmler made a speech to the staff of the Secret State

Police Ofﬁce. He used the opportunity to remind them that he had spoken

to a number of members of the Gestapo at the same venue shortly after 30

June. This had been ‘the worst day that could happen to a soldier in his life’.

For ‘having to shoot one’s own comrades, with whom one has stood

shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for an ideal, in some cases for 8 or 10

years, and who have then let one down, is the most bitter experience that

can or should happen to a person’. However, according to Himmler, 30

June had been an important test for the Gestapo.

Later on in his speech Himmler projected an image of himself as a strict

but caring boss. If they had requests to make they should not put them in

anonymous letters: ‘You will always ﬁnd my door open if you come to me

with a request which you wish to make in connection with yourself or a

colleague, which has something to do with ofﬁcial business, or whether it’s

a personal request because you have a problem as a result of a misfortune or

some other mishap [ . . . ] I can put up with frankness and I will then help

you or at least offer you advice in so far as it is in my power to do so.’ That

also applied to ﬁnancial matters. Thus, he would try his best to negotiate any

fringe beneﬁts that had been promised from the responsible authorities.

Himmler also used the speech for an attack on bureaucratic methods,

which, by using examples, he made to appear ridiculous. Instead, they

should work with ‘military speed’. One of his demands was that all docu-

ments should be signed personally by the person responsible for them.

Finally, Himmler painted the picture of a humane secret police, a sort of

service provider for internal security: ‘The nation must be convinced that

the most just agency in the new state, the one that is most correct, is the

feared Secret State Police. The nation must believe that if someone is pulled

in he has been justly pulled in; they must believe that in all other matters, if

they don’t harm the state, the members of the Secret State Police will

behave in a friendly way, that they have warm hearts and an absolute

sense of justice.’ He exhorted his colleagues to receive visitors ‘in a polite

and friendly manner’. Nobody should be ‘bawled out’. The Gestapo people

should see themselves as ‘facilitators’, not ‘dictators’. Himmler painted his

colleagues the picture of an ofﬁce climate that was positively idyllic: the

184 from inspector to chief of police

following months should be used to strengthen comradeship and to achieve

a ‘cheerful willingness to get on with the work’. Moreover, the working day

would be cut by one hour. But when necessary they must sometimes work

longer. However, he was very happy to grant an extra free day at Christmas

or on other occasions. He ended his speech with three ‘Sieg Heils!’

During the ﬁrst months after 30 June Himmler, who was still only

deputy head of the Gestapo, was primarily concerned to achieve the

maximum possible room for manoeuvre vis-a

-vis his boss, Go

ring. Reﬂect-

ing on the performance of the Gestapo during the years 1933 to the

beginning of 1935 in a speech made in 1936 in the presence of Go

ring,

Himmler criticized it as ‘unsatisfactory’,

thereby revealing the difference

in the goals of the two men. Whereas Himmler pressed for all bureaucratic

obstacles and legal restrictions on the Gestapo to be removed in order to

make it more efﬁcient, after 30 June 1934 Go

ring was seeking ways through

which he might be able to exercise some kind of control over Himmler’s

activities.

In June 1934 Go

ring’s state secretary, Paul Ko

rner, was still asking

Himmler to provide a monthly list of all cases in which protective custody

had been imposed for more than seven days. However, Himmler was

dilatory in handling the request. While Go

ring did receive a list of protec-

tive-custody prisoners from the Gestapa in the summer of 1934 in connec-

tion with Hitler’s amnesty of 7 August, there does not appear to have been

any monthly reporting of the ﬁgures.

In October Go

ring made a new attempt. He issued a set of instructions

for the Secret State Police in which he listed in detail what rights he

reserved to himself as head of the Secret Police: the issuing of ‘general

directives’, the ‘overall supervision of the agency’s work’, personnel mat-

ters involving higher-ranking ofﬁcials, the framing of the budget, and not

least, ‘the supervision of the Inspector’s performance and discipline’. It was

particularly important that Go

ring insisted that these rights of supervision

should be exercised by the Prussian State Ministry, in other words, by his

ofﬁce as Prime Minister. This would have subjected the Gestapa to effec-

tive bureaucratic control.

Moreover, the concentration camps were sub-

ordinated to Himmler in his role as head of the Gestapo and not, as

Himmler had requested in August 1934,asReichsfu

hrer-SS, since that

would have meant that Go

ring would have lost all state control over the

camps.

from inspector to chief of police 185

Ill. 11. On 20 April 1934 Go

ring appointed Himmler ‘Inspector’ of the

Prussian Secret State Police Ofﬁce (Gestapa). Although Go

ring ofﬁcially

retained control of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) in the largest German state,

in fact Himmler was very quickly to succeed—above all as a result of the events

of 30 June 1934—in evading this check on his power.

186 from inspector to chief of police

In the ﬁnal analysis, however, Go

ring’s attempt to secure control over

Himmler in his new role proved impossible. As the responsible ofﬁcial in

the State Ministry put it: ‘We failed to subordinate the Secret State Police to

its legally prescribed supervisory authority.’ The Gestapa thwarted every

attempt by the state bureaucracy to control the concentration camps, by

failing to respond to requests and by submitting to the budgetary authorities

a demand for a lump sum instead of detailing each item of proposed

expenditure. As the State Ministry had meanwhile acquired a copy of the

regulations for Esterwegen concentration camp, and Go

ring was therefore

aware of the arbitrary terror regime practised in the camp, the state autho-

rities were faced with the problem of whether, in view of their failure to

exercise de facto control, they should continue to claim the right to

supervise Himmler’s empire, when this would mean, as the same ofﬁcial

put it, that ‘the Prime Minister as well as the State Ministry’s desk ofﬁcial

would share responsibility for the measures of the Secret State Police’.

The result was that, only a few weeks after issuing his regulations, Go

ring

changed tack. On 20 November 1934 he announced that in future his

powers as head of the Gestapo would be exercised by Himmler. In those

matters that he had reserved for himself the correspondence would be

conducted under the heading ‘Prussian Secret State Police: The Deputy

Chief and Inspector’. Although he informed Himmler on the same day that

he reserved the right ‘to issue him with instructions in matters of funda-

mental importance or in individual cases’,

this did not alter the fact that

Himmler had emerged the victor in this power struggle.

Gestapo and SD

As has already been mentioned, after Himmler’s and Heydrich’s takeover of

the Gestapa the SD headquarters was moved back to Berlin.

In January

1935 the SD Ofﬁce (like the SS Race and Settlement Ofﬁce) was raised to

the status of a Main Ofﬁce and divided into three departments: Administra-

tion and Organization (until 1935 under the direction of Werner Best, who

then transferred to the Gestapa), Domestic Affairs (under Hermann Beh-

rends), and Foreign Affairs (under Heinz Johst).

During the years 1933–4 Himmler had regarded the SD primarily as an

instrument with which to achieve his appointment as head of the political

police departments of the federal states through internal party espionage and

from inspector to chief of police 187

the establishment of personal contacts. Now the Security Service acquired a

secret-police role complementary to that of the Gestapo. The number of

permanent staff had increased by the end of 1934 to 850,amongthem

numerous graduates and members of the intelligentsia.

The SD Domestic

Affairs Department not only kept tabs on the actual and construed opponents

of Nazism but also initiated systematic and comprehensive reporting on the

whole of society. The Foreign Department concentrated its efforts on build-

ing up an autonomous foreign intelligence organization. During its early years

the Foreign Department was still relatively small and appears to have been

insigniﬁcant. One focus of its activities was the potential to utilize the Sudeten

German minority for activities in Czechoslovakia.

However, if one bears in

mind the fact that in January 1934 Go

ring agreed with the Foreign Ministry’s

proposal to ban the Gestapo from undertaking intelligence work abroad, then

one can reasonably interpret these activities as an attempt to use the SD to get

round this ban, which indeed could never be fully enforced.

In fact, Himmler and Heydrich sought to achieve close links between the

Gestapo and the SD. For example, Heydrich demanded that all members of

the political police forces who were simultaneously members of the SS

should join the SD. From 1936 onwards this was also demanded of criminal

police ofﬁcers. In fact the members of the SD formed a separate network

within the Gestapo so that, towards the end of the 1930s, a close intermesh-

ing of security police and SD was to emerge.

On 4 July, immediately after the emasculation of the SA, Himmler had

issued guidelines for the cooperation of the political police and the SD.

According to Himmler, the SD, which had just been declared by Hess to be

the sole intelligence organization of the party, was ‘to participate in the

carrying out of the duties of state security and represents an important

complement to those state agencies that have been assigned these tasks’.

As the ‘rule for the clear separation of the spheres of operation’, Himmler

laid down that the police agencies of the state should combat ‘the enemies of

the Nazi state’, while the SD should ‘investigate the enemies of National

Socialist values and initiate their combating and countering by the police

authorities of the state’. Thus the SD was ‘banned from undertaking any

executive actions’.

In a set of ‘Joint Service Instructions for the Political Police and the SD’

from 1935 or early 1936 Himmler reasserted these principles, and insisted on

close cooperation between the two organizations. Even if the SD could not

take executive action, ‘as an auxiliary agency of the police’ it was still to be

188 from inspector to chief of police

provided with internal information and to have access to documents. It

could request the Gestapo to carry out searches, and conversely the political

police could assign it intelligence tasks.

At the same time, limits were imposed on the extent to which the SD

could pry into internal party affairs. At the end of 1935 Heydrich ordered

that in future ‘investigations and the surveillance of party affairs’ were to be

banned ‘throughout the Security Service’, since various SD ofﬁces, ‘partic-

ularly in small states and districts’, had ‘allowed themselves to become too

involved in local affairs’ and thus had not always been in a position ‘to report

objectively on alleged or actual irregularities within party agencies’.

However, the message for the SD, which had begun its life as a party

intelligence agency, was clear: it must now concentrate above all on its

new sphere of operations.

Gestapo and Reichswehr

Although there were tensions between the SS and the Reichswehr

concerning the SS’s armed units, during 1935 and 1936 Himmler and Hey-

drich were able to win the support of the army leadership for expanding the

role of the Gestapo. When the Gestapa was set up it had also taken over

the responsibility for combating civil espionage that had hitherto lain with the

political police. The fact that the Gestapo now began to increase its activities

in this area initially led to disagreements and conﬂict with military intelli-

gence. At the end of 1934 relations between the Gestapo and the Reichswehr

had reached a low point. Himmler, Go

ring, and Heydrich launched rumours

to the effect that the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Werner von Fritsch,

was planning a coup. In order to reduce the tension, on 3 January Hitler made

a public declaration of loyalty to the army and, on 13 January, Himmler

himself gave a speech to senior ofﬁcers outlining the role of the SS with the

aim of restoring conﬁdence.

At the beginning of 1935 the situation was also eased by the fact that

military intelligence acquired a new head in the shape of Wilhelm Canaris,

an acquaintance of Heydrich’s. Unlike his predecessor, Conrad Patzig, who

was an opponent of the SS, Canaris was relatively open to collaboration

with the Gestapa.

As early as 17 January Heydrich and Canaris had made a

written agreement demarcating the responsibilities between military intelli-

gence and ‘police intelligence’. These so-called ‘ten commandments’ laid

from inspector to chief of police 189