Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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down that the Gestapo would be responsible for counter-intelligence work

in armament factories, frontier protection, and policing foreigners; the

Gestapo then organized a separate frontier police force. Heydrich also

reorganized Department III of the Gestapa, which was responsible for

counter-intelligence, to take account of its new responsibilities. In the

spring of 1935 he removed the section responsible for foreign intelligence

from the department and assigned it to the department responsible for

combating internal enemies, under an innocuous-sounding title. This

avoided disputes over competencies with military intelligence and ensured

that Go

ring’s order that the Gestapo should not conduct espionage appeared

to be being adhered to. At the beginning of 1936 Heydrich appointed his

new head of organization, Werner Best, who was able to establish good

relations with Canaris, to head up Department III.

The agreement with Canaris also dealt with the role the SD was to play in

counter-intelligence. It was now to be speciﬁcally responsible for ‘intelli-

gence cooperation’ in the securing of armaments factories and in frontier

intelligence activities, though without having executive powers; in other

words, for the recruitment of informants. This was the ﬁrst time that the SD

had been recognized by an important state agency.

While the SD was to derive proﬁt from this cooperation in the long run,

the Gestapo beneﬁted immediately from working together with the Reichs-

wehr. As early as January 1935 the Reichswehr Minister, Werner von

Blomberg, sent a copy of the ‘ten commandments’ to the Reich Finance

Minister with a request for ﬁnancial support for the Gestapo’s counter-

intelligence work; his request was approved. Moreover, he asked Reich

Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, to unify the Reich’s counter-intelli-

gence police operations. In July he described his ideas in more detail to Hitler:

it was not simply a matter of ‘creating a uniﬁed organization and direction for

the political police in the Reich with ofﬁcial status with which the Reich-

swehr can deal and work’, but of establishing a ‘Reich political police force’.

In this way Himmler had acquired an ally for his plan to create an ofﬁcial

institution which could absorb the responsibility for the political forces of the

federal states that had hitherto been simply embodied in his person.

In December 1936 Canaris and Best reached a further agreement in the

form of an extension to the ‘ten commandments’. Among other things, this

established the priority for military over civilian counter-intelligence,

which represented a signiﬁcant concession by the Gestapo to the armed

forces.

190 from inspector to chief of police

Protective custody and the Gestapo

Even after Himmler’s takeover of the Gestapa, Frick continued to try to

restrict the arbitrary handling of protective custody. In a letter to the

Bavarian state government of 30 January 1935 the Reich Interior Minister

complained about the large number of prisoners in protective custody in

Bavaria, and emphasized the responsibility of the Bavarian Interior Minister,

Adolf Wagner, for these events. Frick demanded that Wagner should

continually scrutinize these cases of protective custody, as was the case in

Prussia. On 20 February Himmler, who was brought in by Wagner, then

secured a decision by the Fu

hrer which he minuted in the margin of Frick’s

letter of complaint: ‘The prisoners are to remain in custody.’

From the beginning of 1935 onwards, however, there was an increasing

number of civil actions and investigations concerning cases of mistreatment

in concentration camps.

According to Hans Gisevius, who at the time was

a member of the police department in the Reich Interior Ministry, in the

spring of 1935 Frick selected one of the most striking cases, namely, of a

Nazi functionary who had been arrested for criticizing the conditions in the

Papenburg concentration camp. According to Gisevius, Frick demanded

that Himmler should order the immediate release of this man, and said that

if the same thing happened again he would begin an action against Himmler

for wrongful detention. But his threat proved completely ineffective.

Gisevius recalled another case, in which the lawyer representing the

widow of Erich Klausener, the senior civil servant murdered on 30 June

1934, had been arrested by the Gestapo because, in order to represent the

insurance claims of his client, he had had to dispute the ofﬁcial version that

Klausener had committed suicide. He, Gisevius, had then prepared a report

for Frick, which the latter had sent to Hitler. Himmler had recounted the

affair at a meeting of Nazi leaders, who had subsequently criticized Frick for

the way he had gone about things.

Himmler repeatedly managed to get senior ﬁgures to cover up for his

arbitrary rule. His position was strengthened not least by the fact that on

2 May 1935 the highest Prussian administrative court decided that Gestapo

measures were not subject to revision by the administrative courts.

Five

days later, during a meeting in which complaints against mistreatment were

being discussed, the Gestapa chief gave Hitler a letter from a former Dachau

from inspector to chief of police 191

inmate to Eicke, expressing his gratitude for ‘the good time he had had as a

prisoner’.

Frick received support for his attempt to limit the arbitrary

system in the concentration camps from the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz

rtner. In a letter to Frick dated 14 May, Gu

rtner demanded that, while

corporal punishment in the camps should not be abolished, it should be

‘uniformly and clearly’ regulated; arbitrary mistreatment and torture should

be ended and brutal guards punished.

At this time Himmler had already proposed a draft Gestapa law with

which he aimed to confront his opponents with a fait accompli. It proposed

that the Gestapa should be raised to the status of a Prussian ministry. As far as

its responsibilities were concerned, the draft stated tersely: ‘The head of the

Secret State Police shall determine the particular matters that are to be

transferred to the Secret State Police.’

However, Himmler’s attempt to

acquire such an extensive range of powers was rejected, not only by the

Prussian Justice and Interior Ministries but by the whole of the Prussian

cabinet.

The cabinet meeting of 27 June 1935, which was attended by Himmler,

was also unanimous in taking the opportunity to restrict protective custody.

The ministers decided that it was not permissible to prevent lawyers from

representing prisoners in protective custody. Moreover, in future, protec-

tive custody should not be imposed for a speciﬁed period nor should it be

imposed instead of a sentence of imprisonment. In addition, Frick informed

his colleagues that the Interior Ministry was working on a draft law that

would create a clear ‘legal basis’ for the measures of the Secret State Police.

Thus, by taking the initiative at Reich level, Frick wanted to try to pre-empt

Himmler’s attempt to introduce a regulation for Prussia, and in this way to

set limits to his terror system.

Himmler gets his way

Himmler defended his position by spending the spring and summer of 1935

making strenuous efforts to prove that his radical methods were necessary

and, moreover, efﬁcient. In doing so he placed particular emphasis on the

‘communist threat’.

By this time the Gestapo had already extensively researched the structures

of the communist milieu. The local activists who were likely to engage in

communist underground activity were often already well known and,

192 from inspector to chief of police

thanks to its active recruitment of informants, the Secret State Police was

often in a position to roll up regional communist networks at a stroke and

carry out mass arrests. Between 1934 and 1935–6 the same process kept

recurring in most of the KPD districts, that is to say, the communist

networks would be destroyed, then after several months rebuilt, then

destroyed again, and then rebuilt until gradually the reserves of communist

resistance ﬁghters were exhausted. Any underground activity that still took

place in fact usually took place under the eyes of the Gestapo. It determined

when the communist underground cells would be ﬁnally eliminated and,

from 1935 onwards, carried out spectacular mass arrests, during which

communists would be arrested ‘as a preventive measure’ without it having

to be proved that they had actually taken part in resistance activities.

The

‘communist threat’ was thus a phenomenon that was largely under the

control of the Gestapo, which put Himmler in the comfortable position

of being able to produce ‘successes’ in the struggle against the communist

underground whenever he needed to. In this way he could ‘prove’ three

things: the continuing threat posed by the KPD, the watchfulness of his

political police, as well as the need to extend the competence of the Gestapo

in order to be ready to meet future threats.

As early as 28 March 1935 Himmler had sent Justice Minister Gu

rtner

a detailed memorandum concerning the ‘communist movement’. In this

memorandum, which there is reason to believe was written by Best, he

not only outlined the communist threat in the most sombre colours but also

argued that it could not be effectively combated by using the methods of

a liberal state. The author of the memorandum began with the general

statement that in ‘a liberal state’ the police’s hands were ‘tied by formal

laws’. The ‘individualistic-liberal values, which asserted the rights of political

prisoners, enabled them to behave towards the police in a particularly trucu-

lent manner’. This was a very different matter under National Socialism:

Every individual is a member of the organism of the state [ ...]Ifheplaces himself

outside the community and becomes a criminal, he becomes a pest to everybody

and will be attacked by everybody, that is to say, by the state. In this struggle the

state will be acting in self defence [ . . . ] The police are the arm and the eyes of the

law. They must be the ﬁrst to defend the security of the state under the conditions

imposed by having to act in self defence. They cannot treat a criminal who ignores

ethical and moral principles, who is excluding himself from the national commu-

nity, according to aesthetic criteria. He must be made to feel that the state is just as

ruthless in its treatment of him as he was intolerant towards the state.

from inspector to chief of police 193

It was thus essential, ‘given the need to protect the state, really to get to grips

with criminals during the course of police interrogation’, and equally

necessary ‘for the authoritarian, National Socialist state to provide its exec-

utive agencies with the means to compel offenders to adopt another attitude

towards it. To refer to the integrity of the person of an offender who has

been arrested on the basis of evidence is to adopt a liberal perspective.’ That

was a clear justiﬁcation of torture, even if Himmler emphasized in this

memorandum that he had forbidden the political police to use any ‘vio-

lence’ during interrogations.

The ‘communist movement in Germany’, the memorandum continued,

‘is continually growing. This is not so much the result of economic condi-

tions as, above all, a consequence of the completely inadequate means for

pursuing members of the movement’. Only when functionaries who had

been arrested ‘can be compelled by every means to reveal their meeting

places, their illegal hideouts, etc.’ would there be success in ‘penetrating

further into the communist organizations’ and ‘preventing’ the illegal KPD

‘from developing into a mass party’.

The memorandum is an important piece of evidence pointing to a

change in the way the Gestapo operated. Whereas hitherto the Gestapo

had primarily responded to actual acts of resistance, now it was moving

towards preventive actions against the whole of the communist milieu. In

order to bolster his claim that the communist threat was ubiquitous Himm-

ler now launched a wave of arrests covering the whole of the Reich.

To begin with, the ﬁve-man Central Executive of the KPD was arrested in

March 1935.

In the same month the Gestapo netted 350 members in

Saxony, 300 in Gau Halle-Merseburg, and 280 in Du

sseldorf.

In the

Ruhr, where the KPD had already been largely wiped out in 1934, further

mass arrests took place in May 1935,

as well as in Cologne during June and

July 1935.

In Hamburg the Gestapo began to carry out a major series of

arrests in June 1935, and by the autumn around 1,000 communists had been

caught.

In Chemnitz, Zwickau, and other central-German towns the

Gestapo also carried out a wave of arrests in the spring and summer of

1935.

In Munich, where the KPD had been forming its third illegal

leadership in Upper Bavaria since 1934,

the Gestapo had succeeded in

penetrating so deeply into the organization that it could more or less direct

the party’s underground activities at will. In the summer and autumn of 1935,

and during the following summer, the communist groups in the Bavarian

capital were ﬁnally eliminated in the course of two series of mass arrests.

194 from inspector to chief of police

On 12 July 1935, when the mass arrests were already in progress, Himm-

ler ordered the ﬁrst major action that was purely preventive in intention: the

arrest of a thousand former KPD functionaries throughout the Reich. In

fact, a far larger number of communists were to be taken into ‘preventive

custody’ in the course of these mass arrests.

In addition, in the summer of

1935 Himmler ordered between 200 and 300 communists to be put in

concentration camps as a reprisal for a shooting incident that took place

between border police and alleged communist smugglers near the Czech

border in Saxony.

In the course of 1935 a total of around 14,000 commu-

nist functionaries were arrested.

In the end, the criticism that was directed at the arbitrary acts of the

Gestapo and the cases of mistreatment in the concentration camps, in partic-

ular by conservatives, had no effect. It did, however, lead to the whole

Gestapo being disciplined through its division into a hierarchy of levels, and

its organization being tightened, more effectively controlled from its head-

quarters, and uniﬁed.

This was above all the work of Werner Best, who

had been appointed Heydrich’s deputy and head of the administrative depart-

ment in the Gestapa at the beginning of 1935.

In February 1936 Himmler was able ﬁnally to consolidate his position at

the head of the Prussian Gestapa. On 10 February, after almost a year of

consultations, the Prussian Gestapa Law was issued, which to large extent

reﬂected his ideas.

The law concluded the development of the political

police into an autonomous special government department along the lines

that he had envisaged. There was no mention of the restrictions on protec-

tive custody which the cabinet had agreed the previous June. The decisive

factor in this success was Hitler’s very personal interest in this matter.

Himmler, who was directly subordinated to him as Reichsfu

hrer-SS,

provided Hitler with the guarantee of being able to move against anyone

at any time he felt like it, as had happened on 30 June 1934. This could now

be achieved through an organization that operated to perfection, was highly

disciplined, and had been removed from the hierarchy of the internal

administration but otherwise worked in accordance with the principles of

the Prussian bureaucracy. A secret police that was integrated into the

general police apparatus and internal administration, and which Hitler

could only have deployed by involving the ministerial bureaucracy,

would not have provided him with this capability. Thus, Himmler was

the man who enabled Hitler actually to exercise his position as a dictator

with, in principle, unlimited power through the deployment of state terror.

from inspector to chief of police 195

The fact that Himmler had succeeded in making protective custody,

a form of imprisonment that had emerged at the time of the takeover of

power and was by its very nature indeterminate and not subject to any legal

supervision, into a permanent institution and to do so despite the protests of

the Reich Ministries of the Interior and Justice, provided the real foundation

for his position of power within the dictatorship. In the person of Himmler,

an arbitrary prerogative state had succeeded in replacing a state that had

operated according to the law and was bound by norms. However, for

Himmler this turning-point represented merely the ﬁrst stage in his career

in the Third Reich.

‘Phases in Our Struggle’

Himmler’s attempts to free the political police from all irksome legal bonds,

to make it more independent, and to protect it from outside interference

coincided with a public campaign which Himmler’s deputy, Heydrich, had

launched in May 1935 with a series of articles in the SS journal, Das Schwarze

Korps, with the title ‘Phases in Our Struggle’.

The basic idea for the series was that, following the destruction of all

opposition organizations, the enemies of Nazism had by no means been

defeated. The Nazi movement was, it was claimed, far too little aware of the

fact that the real threat came from ‘intellectual forces’ who were maintain-

ing the struggle against Nazism with undiminished energy. The ‘driving

forces behind this opposition [were] always the same: World Jewry, World

Freemasonry, and a to a large extent politicized ofﬁcial priesthood’ (Hey-

drich corrected himself in the next issue of Das Schwarze Korps to the effect

that ‘Freemasonry’ was really simply ‘a front organization for Jewry’). These

forces, it was further claimed, generally operated in ‘disguise’ against Na-

zism, with so-called specialists within the state machine, who had allowed

themselves to be ‘coordinated’ only for appearances’ sake, playing a key

role. This represented a massive attack on Himmler’s opponents within the

state administration, who were simply being labelled as enemies of Nazism.

In this scenario ‘Bolshevism’, which had hitherto always been rated enemy

number one, now appeared merely as a superﬁcial phenomenon behind

which the ‘real’ opponents were hiding. The state police, it was said, were

incapable of dealing with these on their own. Instead, in this ‘ideological

struggle’ the SS, as ‘the ideological shock troops’ of the Nazi movement,

196 from inspector to chief of police

were called upon to play a role in the vanguard. In any event, the struggle

would be fought without quarter given: ‘If we are to look after our people

we must treat our opponents harshly, even at the risk of sometimes hurting

an individual opponent and of possibly being viliﬁed by some, no doubt

well-meaning, people as wild brutes.’

This series of articles marked the Gestapo’s transition from the policy of

destroying the communist underground organization to a much broader

conception of pursuing ‘its intellectual originators’ and ‘the brains behind

the operation’. The four articles were directly linked to the systematic

persecution of Catholic priests and lay brothers as well as with the so-called

second anti-Semitic wave, which the party launched in the spring of 1935

and ﬁnally led to the issuing of the Nuremberg Laws in September of the

same year.

In 1936 high-ranking SS functionaries repeatedly took up Heydrich’s

ideas and expanded on them.

Four points in particular were emphasized:

ﬁrst, in order to achieve success the struggle against their political enemies—

Jews, Freemasons, politically active priests—must be pursued with foresight,

comprehensively, and above all preventively;

secondly, the work of the

political police must not be limited by legal restrictions;

thirdly, the

Gestapo, the SD, and the General SS must be merged to form a ‘State

Protection Corps’;

and fourthly, uncompromising harshness and ruthless-

ness were required in pursuit of these goals, a point to which Himmler kept

returning.

As early as in his speech to the German Peasants’ Rally in Goslar, which

was intended as a fundamental statement of his views, Himmler had em-

phasized that the SS would ensure ‘that never again can a Jewish-Bolshevist

revolution of subhumanity be initiated in Germany, the very heart of

Europe, either from within or by outside emissaries. We shall act as a

merciless sword of judgement on all these forces, of whose existence and

activities we are well aware, on the day that they make even the slightest

attempt—whether today, in decades, or in millennia.’

In a speech on 5 March 1936 to the Prussian State Council, a body that

ring had created in 1933 as a replacement for the organization represent-

ing the Prussian provinces, which had been dissolved, Himmler emphasized

once again his determination above all to be merciless and ruthless. At ﬁrst

he referred to the past dispute about the creation of an autonomous secret

police, without disguising his satisfaction at having emerged as the victor of

this conﬂict: ‘And so in the course of 1934 we came to the point where,

from inspector to chief of police 197

with German decency but—and I believe I’m entitled to make this com-

ment—totally underestimating our opponents, we almost completely

cleared the concentration camps and even contemplated whether we

couldn’t dissolve the political police and integrate it completely into the

rest of the police, the criminal police, and into the general administration.’

At the time he himself had taken the ‘opposite view’ and ‘urgently warned

against such ideas’. For ‘the idea that the political struggle against our

opponents: Jewry, Bolshevism, Jewiﬁed world Freemasonry, and all the

forces that do not want a new, revived Germany is over, is in my view a

grave error, for Germany is right at the beginning of what may be a

centuries-long struggle, perhaps the decisive world struggle with these

forces of organized subhumanity.’

With this speech Himmler had for the ﬁrst time discovered the useful

formula with which in future he was repeatedly to describe the conglomer-

ation of enemies the SS saw itself confronted with. And in this context he

referred to his favourite topic of ‘decency’ (Ansta

ndigkeit), which he now

used in a most interesting way. The Reichsfu

hrer-SS considered it

as one of the greatest tasks of the German people to reassert the decency that is

fundamental to us in the way in which we conduct our struggles, and that our

conﬂicts, not only the physical and intellectual ones, but also those relating to

rational, human, ofﬁcial, departmental, and world political issues, whether in the

most mundane or in the most signiﬁcant spheres, are pursued in an exemplary

manner. We must cultivate these values in all areas of life at home and outside

Germany vis-a

-vis all those opponents who are worthy of this way of proceeding.

This did not apply, however, to the most dangerous opponents, to whom he

once again speciﬁcally denied the status of human beings with equal rights:

But it would be mad to apply this chivalrous attitude to Jewry and Bolshevism,

whose political methods involve amorality, deception, and mendacity and who, in

accordance with typical Jewish principles, consider the failure to destroy an oppo-

nent as weakness. Also to adopt a chivalrous form of combat towards a Jesuit, who

is engaged in a struggle for earthly power and who justiﬁes lying in a way that is

incomprehensible to us through the theory of the ‘reservatio mentalis’, would be

virtually the equivalent of surrender [ . . . ] All in all, I should like to say that we

Germans must at last learn not to regard the Jews and Jewish-inﬂuenced organiza-

tions as human beings who are members of our species and as people who share our

way of thinking.

The Gestapo, Himmler continued, must ‘combine the two elements’

through which Germany had become great: ‘the military and the civil

198 from inspector to chief of police

service.’

However, what sounds like a peace-offering to the state bureau-

cracy was perhaps intended only to disguise the fact that at this point the

political scene had been set for the realization of a programme that inter-

preted the concept of ‘state protection’ far more extensively than was

suggested by the public statements of leading SS functionaries during the

years 1935–6. The Reichsfu

hrer-SS was aiming to take over the whole of

the German police and thereby to realize a concept of preventive repression,

in which the struggle against political enemies was to go hand in hand with

the elimination of the allegedly ‘biological’ roots of criminality.

In June 1935 Hitler approved Himmler’s proposal to form the concentra-

tion camp guards into a military unit.

On 18 October 1935 Himmler then

managed to persuade Hitler that the German police needed to be reorga-

nized, and secured the latter’s agreement that he should take over the whole

of the police. However, Himmler’s appointment as ‘Chief of the German

Police’ occurred only nine months after this decisive meeting, as before

then lengthy negotiations had to take place with the Interior Ministry. In

fact, from September 1935 Frick had been pursuing his own plans to

establish a Reich police force and to reintegrate the Gestapo into the general

police organization.

One can reconstruct Himmler’s line of argument from the notes he made

of his meeting with Hitler on 18 October 1935.

At ﬁrst he talked about the

pursuit of political opponents, which at that time had already passed its peak.

(‘1. Treatment of the communists’). Then, under ‘2. Abortion’, he discussed

the dangers this allegedly posed for ‘the whole nation’ and the requisite police

counter-measures. He used ‘3. Asocial elements’ to consider how the tradi-

tional range of police tasks could be expanded in the Third Reich. Finally, he

dealt with the topic ‘4. Guard units’, and under ‘5. Gestapo edict’, opposed

the attempts of Reich Interior Minister Frick to establish a Reich police force

and reintegrate the Gestapo into the general police organization.

Himmler achieved more in his meeting with Hitler than the takeover of

the police. As is clear from a note that he made on the same day, Hitler also

agreed to the creation of SS leadership colleges and discussed with him

the possibility of ‘internal unrest’ and, in this context, the expansion of the

armed SS units (SS-Verfu

gungstruppe).

Thus, the aim of amalgamating

the SS and the police and their deployment under the auspices of a security

concept that went far beyond conventional police tasks was beginning to

emerge in outline. What this involved in detail Himmler would clarify only

from inspector to chief of police 199