Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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after his appointment to the new post of Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Chief of the

German Police.

Only a few days later, on 21 October 1935, Hitler rejected Frick’s

proposal to take over the Reich Security Service, in other words, the

small special unit responsible for the personal protection of the dictator

and senior politicians of the regime. Hitler informed Frick that Himmler

was formally responsible for the Reich Security Service; but in fact Hitler

was himself in command, and in particular retained for himself the selection

of its personnel. Frick’s move could thus be interpreted as an attempt to

restrict the dictator’s room for manoeuvre in a sensitive area, an exception-

ally clumsy one, given his ambitions vis-a

-vis the police.

Himmler, on the other hand, continued to exploit his advantage. On 1

November 1935 he had another meeting with Hitler. The Reich Justice

Ministry had submitted complaints about the arbitrary nature of protective

custody and the terror exercised in the concentration camps. Himmler

succeeded in rebutting the accusations, and could subsequently curtly

inform the Justice Minister that Hitler had expressly forbidden the employ-

ment of lawyers in cases of protective custody and, apart from that, saw no

reason to intervene after being presented with a list of deaths in the

concentration camps produced by the Justice Ministry. This was unneces-

sary in view of the ‘exceptionally conscientious management of the con-

centration camps’.

In March 1936 the Justice Minister did manage to

secure Himmler’s agreement in principle to permit particular lawyers, who

would be appointed in agreement with the Gestapo, to represent concen-

tration camp prisoners. However, in the event the Gestapo prevented the

implementation of this regulation by systematic stalling.

It is clear that for

Himmler it was a matter of principle: prisoners in protective custody should

on no account be able to claim the protection of the law. It was precisely the

arbitrary character of concentration camp imprisonment that produced its

deterrent effect, and it was on this fear that, in the ﬁnal analysis, Himmler’s

power was based.

On 17 June 1936 Hitler ﬁnally appointed Himmler ‘Reichsfu

hrer-SS and

Chief of the German Police within the Reich Ministry of the Interior’.

The formula ‘within the Reich Ministry of the Interior’ proved in practice

to be just as meaningless as the statement in the same law that Himmler was

‘personally and directly’ subordinate to the Reich Interior Minister. What

was decisive was the fact that Frick had proved unable to integrate Himmler

effectively into his ministry. In fact the opposite occurred; Himmler

200 from inspector to chief of police

removed the police from the internal administration and took over the

responsibility for it himself. What proved decisive was the linking together

of the police and the SS. As Reichsfu

hrer-SS, Himmler was already directly

subordinate to Hitler and, therefore, could always receive his orders directly

from his ‘Fu

hrer’. As Chief of the German Police, Himmler carefully

evaded the Reich Interior Ministry by immediately creating two new

Main Departments: the Security Police, comprising the Gestapo and the

Criminal Police (Kripo) under Heydrich, and the Order Police under

Daluege. These were hybrid organizations that anticipated the intended

amalgamation of SS and police.

On 20 September 1936 the R eich and Prussian Minister of the Interior

issued an edict delegating to the Gestapa the duties of the political police

commanders of the federal states, These were the duties that Himmler had

hitherto carried out via the headquarters of the Police Commander based

within the Gestapa. From now on they were to be exercised directly by the

Secret State Police Ofﬁce (Gestapa) itself.

This meant that the centralized

secret Reich police force, which the Nazi leaders in the individual states had

hoped to prevent, had ﬁnally come about. They now had to accept that

their inﬂuence on the political police was minimal.

from inspector to chief of police 201

The State Protection Corps

n a dictatorship the head of the police is assessed above all on the basis of

how far he succeeds in neutralizing actual or alleged opponents of the

regime. Thus, on the one hand, he will try to demonstrate the existence of

such opponents by preparing reports on the threat they pose and, on the

other, continually seek to document how such opponents have successfully

been eliminated. However, he faces a certain dilemma in having to achieve

a satisfactory balance in the relationship between threat and repression. If

opponents are combated too successfully then the threat will decline and the

police chief will thereby undermine his position in the long term; but if he

paints the threat in too dark colours and thus reveals that, despite the

measures of persecution, the threat is not declining but actually increasing,

then he will simply demonstrate his incompetence. It is thus essential for

him to achieve the right degree of both threat and its successful repression.

Applied to Himmler’s position as Chief of the German Police in the

1930s, this process produced the following scenario: the Nazis’ main oppo-

nents were the communists. From 1933 onwards the reports of the Gestapo

and SD documented a continual growth in the communist threat and, as a

result, an increase in the combating of the communist movement. As was

suggested above, however, this trend could not continue indeﬁnitely if the

security police did not wish to jeopardize its work; on the other hand, from

its point of view an end to the communist threat could not be desirable

because it would remove an essential basis for its very existence.

There were two possible ways of escaping from this dilemma: an expansion

of the range of opponents and the conception of ‘preventive defence’. If the

efforts of the security police were no longer concentrated primarily on

defence against concrete threats and the exposure of acts of resistance

that had already taken place, and instead focused on possible threats in the

medium or long term, which could spring from a multiplicity of sources—or,

to put it another way, on ﬁctional threats—then the success of the security

apparatus would be freed from its fatal dependence on concrete dangers. The

work of the security police could then be portrayed as the result of far-sighted

planning. In other words, the success of prevention as a strategy depended

primarily on how convincing the security police was in depicting the future

dangers.

With Hitler’s fundamental agreement in the autumn of 1935 to his using

a comprehensive concept of prevention as the basis for police work,

Himmler had succeeded in taking the ﬁrst step towards implementing this

strategy. The transition to ‘general prevention’ then occurred on several

levels.

In the ﬁrst place, Himmler decided to reorientate the combating of the

communist movement—explicitly in the light of a coming war—towards

preventive measures, so that in future he could report both a reduction in

communist activities and an increase in the number of communist prisoners.

The combating of communism no longer needed to be justiﬁed in terms of

communist acts of resistance, with the result that the embarrassment of

repeated successes in this sphere being regarded in the ﬁnal analysis as a

sign of failure was avoided. The targets for this ‘preventive’ project were

‘the brains behind the operation’, ‘troublemakers’, and ‘intellectual initia-

tors’; and, by associating communism with other ‘international’ enemies,

the increased persecution of Jews and priests who were critical of the regime

could be construed within the same uniform conception of prevention.

However, the substantial halt to the campaign against the churches in 1937

resulted in the repression increasingly being concentrated on the Jewish

minority.

Secondly, Himmler extended the preventive task of combating opponents

to all forms of opposition, even those that were harmless and unspeciﬁc. The

spreading of rumours and jokes, public demonstration of discontent with the

regime, statements of loyalty to the Christian churches, and so on allegedly

threatened the internal unity of the nation, and so the security police, as the

protector of the national community, had to intervene.

Thirdly, Himmler integrated the combating of criminality into the work

of the security police by representing criminality as essentially a conse-

quence of biological defects, which must be—preventively—eliminated.

Fourthly, he set the security police the task of focusing on the ‘national

plagues’ of abortion and homosexuality in order to ensure the German

people’s biological survival.

the state protection corps 203

The transition to prevention resulted in a considerable extension and

reorientation of traditional police work; in fact the police was integrated

into a reformed apparatus of repression organized on the basis of a division

of labour. The amalgamation of political repression and the combating of

criminality was a logical consequence of the combination of the Gestapo

and the criminal police (Kripo) to form the security police. While the

restructured police continued to perform the executive functions as before,

the provision of evidence of potential threats was primarily the task of the

SD, which had intellectual ambitions and which was now closely linked

with the state police. Moreover, the ideological indoctrination of the

police, in particular the orientation of police work along biological lines,

made the integration of SS and police appear sensible.

Thus Himmler succeeded in making the takeover of the whole of the

police apparatus in 1936 appear not as a simple accumulation of power but as

part of a much broader project, which involved a more far-reaching security

concept: the amalgamation of the police and the SS. What Himmler

envisaged was a state protection corps that would avert all potential threats

to the nation and the ‘Aryan race’ as perceived by Nazi racial ideology.

On the occasion of his taking up his post as Chief of the German Police on

18 June 1936 Himmler made a speech in the courtyard of the Prussian

Interior Ministry in which he justiﬁed the expansion of the police on the

grounds of the need to be prepared for future conﬂicts with external

enemies:

We are a country in the heart of Europe surrounded by open borders, surrounded

by a world that is becoming more and more Bolshevized, and increasingly taken

over by the Jew in his w orst form, namely the tyranny of a to tally destructive

Bolshevism. To believe that this development is going to come to an end in a year’s

time, or in several years or even in decades, is culpably reckless and erroneous. We

must assume that this struggle will last for generations, for it’s the age-old struggle

between humans and subhumans in its current new phase of the struggle between

the Aryan peoples and Jewry and the organizational form Jewry has adopted of

Bolshevism. I see my task as being to prepare the whole nation for this struggle by

building up the police welded together with the order of the SS as the organization

to protect the Reich at home just as the Wehr macht provides protection against

threats from abroad.

This notion of Himmler’s, the German police ‘welded together with the

order of the SS’, was then adopted by Werner Best in an inﬂuential article in

204 the state protection corps

the journal of the Academy of German Law in order to explain that this

concept of a ‘state protection corps’, which hitherto had been used for the

amalgamation of the political police and the SS, had now acquired a new

meaning. It now described the planned fusion of the SS and the whole of

the police service.

The point that was being unambiguously made was that

Himmler’s appointment as Chief of the German Police did not mean that

the Gestapo was being reintegrated into the general police apparatus but, on

the contrary, marked the start of a development, in the course of which the

police would be completely removed from the traditional administrative

apparatus and be linked to the SS to form an entirely new type of ‘state

protection corps’.

A few months later Himmler went a step further, and proposed the ﬁnal

departure of the police from the principle of legality. Whereas in previous

years he, together with Heydrich and Best, had demanded and achieved a

special status for the political police unrestricted by ‘legal norms’, he now

demanded that this should apply to the whole of the police.

Signiﬁcantly, he announced his fundamental opposition to—indeed

contempt for—the principle of legality at the inaugural session of the

Committee for Police Law. He conceded that this might ‘appear odd’,

given that the location of the meeting was the Academy for German Law,

but he was by no means inclined—‘you will appreciate that’—to make any

concessions concerning his basic position, as became clear from his remi-

niscences about the ﬁrst phase following the seizure of power: ‘We National

Socialists then set to work [ . . . ] not without justice, but possibly outside the

law. Right from the start I took the view that it did not matter in the least if

our actions were contrary to some clause in the law; in my work for the

hrer and the nation I do what my conscience tells me is right and what is

common sense.’ Viewed from a vo

lkisch standpoint, ‘in every nation there

must be certain things that can only be seen in a certain way, and whether

seen by a cowherd or a minister, it would not be decent to regard them in

any other way’.

On this occasion Himmler put forward another idea: ‘We Germans,’ he

said, because of the particular development of the country, ‘[have] become

obsessed with making rules’, and ‘through our rule-making with its strict

regulations and discipline [have] produced two types, the civil servant and

the soldier’. But the German police could not be ‘simply civil servants or

soldiers’; rather, they must develop ‘a soldierly civil service’. Himmler had

already advocated this fusion of soldier and civil servant as a future model for

the state protection corps 205

the Gestapo six months earlier in his speech to the Prussian state councillors

in March. But now he gave this version a further twist. Himmler recom-

mended the model of a soldierly civil service for the whole of the German

police force. It would be ‘given more and more training—and that will be

the work of generations—and one day will share the spirit of the SS, an un-

civil service-like and un-soldierly organization, that has been created in the

spirit of an order based on blood and promoting family inheritance and

which must develop over centuries, even millennia’.

In March 1937 Himmler once more expressed his views about the tasks of

the police in public. The occasion was a publication to mark the sixtieth

birthday of Interior Minister Frick, Himmler’s main opponent in his take-

over of the police. Himmler used his article to stress once more, contrary to

the views of Frick, who was rightly called by his biographer the ‘legalist of

the unjust state’,

that as a matter of principle the activities of the police

could not be described or restricted by law.

In Himmler’s view, the police had to perform two main duties: ‘(a) the

police must carry out the will of the leadership of the state and create and

maintain the order that it wishes to establish. (b) The police must secure the

German nation as an organic entity, its life force and its institutions, against

destruction and subversion.’ The powers of a police force that was set such

tasks ‘must not therefore be constrained by formal limits, because these

limits would otherwise also stand in the way of it carrying out the tasks set

by the state leadership’. Like the Wehrmacht, the police could act only on

the orders of the leadership and not according to the law.

Himmler then dealt in detail with the functions of the order police

(Ordnungspolizei) and security police (Sicherheitspolizei). While the ﬁrst was

mainly responsible for ‘maintaining public order’, the security police funda-

mentally had ‘the defensive task of averting attacks from all those forces which

in any way might weaken or destroy the health, the life force, and the

effectiveness of the nation and the state’. The criminal police must concen-

trate on those people ‘who, as a result of physical or intellectual degeneration,

have removed themselves from the natural bonds of the national community

and in the ruthless pursuit of their own personal interests have breached the

regulations that have been instituted for the protection of the nation and

the community’. The Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei), on the other

hand, was engaged in a ‘continual struggle’ against those who, ‘as tools of

the ideological and political enemies of the German people, are trying to

undermine the unity of the German nation and to destroy its state power’.

206 the state protection corps

In his contribution to the celebratory volume Heydrich added an ‘offen-

sive’ component to Himmler’s envisaged ‘defensive’ role for the police: ‘it

has to be offensively investigating all opposition and combating it in order to

pre-empt its destructive and subversive effects.’ In particular, Heydrich

made a close link between conventional crime and ideological and political

threats to the so-called Third Reich: ‘Subhumans threaten the health and life

of the national body in two respects: as criminals they damage and under-

mine the community and they also act as tools and weapons for the plans of

those powers hostile to the nation.’ According to Heydrich, ‘international,

ideological, and intellectual opponents’ utilized ‘subhumanity, which is

invariably bent on subversion and disorder, but also the supporters of their

own political and ideological organizations, in other words Jewry, Freema-

sonry, and the politicized churches. Moreover, they utilize all those other

groups in the German nation who, whether consciously or having been

Ill. 12. Himmler addressing the Committee for Police Law. Among his

attentive audience were (from l. to r.): Reinhard Heydrich, Hans Frank, Werner

Best, and Kurt Daluege.

the state protection corps 207

misled, support special interests that are detrimental to the German people

(Legitimists, etc.).’

In this description of the role of the security police everything had been

thrown together: the struggle against crime, against ‘subhumanity’, against

any kind of disorder, against Jews, Freemasons, and the churches. All these

unpleasant manifestations were to be ‘pre-emptively’ dealt with. It could

hardly be clearer that the preventive policy of the new police leadership was

directed against a conglomeration of enemies of the state of the most varied

stripe that was impossible to disentangle, and that whoever had the authority

to deﬁne these enemies and to pursue them would effectively have unlim-

ited power. Himmler and Heydrich were ultimately able to secure their

demand that the activities of the police should not be limited by law. No

codiﬁcation of police duties in a new police legal code was ever produced.

Up until 1945 the legal basis for the measures carried out by the police

remained the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933, which had

suspended the fundamental rights of the Weimar Constitution. Thus the

German police, which Himmler took over in 1936, acted under a perma-

nent state of emergency.

In his public comments on the police at this time Himmler repeatedly

emphasized the determination and ‘toughness’ of the Gestapo and the SS in

dealing with enemies of the state. He admitted that this attitude had resulted

in the SS being not exactly popular with the public, a fact that was not

inconvenient for him, as it was, after all, part of a strategy of surrounding the

Gestapo, SS, and concentration camps with an aura of terror. Already in

November 1935 Himmler had admitted to the German Peasants’ Rally that

he knew that ‘there are some people in Germany who feel sick when they

see this black uniform; we understand that and do not expect that many

people will like us. But all those whose hearts are true to Germany will and

should respect us, and those who for some reason and at some time have a

bad conscience about the Fu

hrer or the nation should fear us.’

In a radio broadcast to mark German Police Day in January 1937 Himm-

ler noted that he saw his main task as being ‘to neutralize all malign

opponents and enemies of the National Socialist state. Whether the oppo-

nent is communist or reactionary is irrelevant.’ They would pursue ‘dis-

ciples of Moscow’ in just the same way as ‘incorrigible reactionaries’ or

‘religious malcontents’. He knew, Himmler continued, that ‘I and my

colleagues have made a number of enemies as a result of the toughness

with which we have carried out this task, and will go on making them. But I

208 the state protection corps

am convinced that it’s better to be misunderstood by a few, to be hated by

some opponents, but in the process to do what is necessary for Germany.’

The picture painted by Himmler and leading SS functionaries of the

police, and above all of the Gestapo, was sometimes underlined by such

threatening gestures, but sometimes by the assurance that normal citizens

had nothing to fear, that they would be treated fairly and justly, and,

moreover, that the pursuit of opponents was being carried out in accor-

dance with purely objective considerations. Himmler summed up this

ambivalent public representation in his speech on the occasion of the

1937 German Police Day in the following formula: ‘tough and implacable

where necessary, understanding and generous where possible.’

Since 1933 the Nazi regime had made no secret of its belief in a police

force, or rather a secret police, operating ruthlessly against political oppo-

nents and criminals. The initial emphasis of this propaganda had been on the

need effectively to eliminate communist or ‘Marxist’ opponents. During the

mid-1930s the emphasis shifted towards asserting that the police in general,

and the security police in particular, provided comprehensive protection for

the national community by suppressing any oppositional activity that was

‘hostile to the nation’, and through its preventive measures ensured that

crime was nipped in the bud. It publicly advocated the notion of ‘police

justice’, in other words, the regime’s practice of using the Gestapo to punish

actual or alleged miscreants. At the same time, it tried to present the police

as ‘a friend and helpmate’, as the ofﬁcial slogan put it, and to stress the high

moral value of police work.

However, in numerous newspaper articles and publications, above all

those marking German Police Day,

which was celebrated annually from

1934 onwards and from 1937 lasted for a whole week, one theme was

stressed above all: the notion of an ever-present and all-knowing secret

police; in short, a Gestapo myth was created.

Gestapo and SD

According to Himmler, the police should show themselves to be ‘under-

standing and generous’, above all, as he put it in a speech to mark the 1937

German Police Day, because they had to rely on the ‘active and sympathetic

support of every German national comrade’.

He expressed his astonish-

ment, however, at the extent of this ‘cooperation’ as it manifested itself in

the state protection corps 209