Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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the day-to-day operations of the police. Thus, in a speech on the Brocken

to celebrate the summer solstice on 22 May 1936, he commented ‘that

Germany is the biggest hotbed of gossip in the world. It’s sometimes really

quite difﬁcult to retain any respect for people when one keeps hearing how

they denounce each other, how they keep making idiots of themselves. In

Germany one doesn’t need to have any agents; the people do all the

informing themselves.’

Research into the Gestapo

appears at ﬁrst glance to conﬁrm this picture

of a society that kept watch on itself. Thus, in his study of the Du

sseldorf

Gestapo Reinhard Mann came to the conclusion that only 15 per cent of the

cases that he examined

had been initiated by the Gestapo itself , whereas at

26 per cent denunciations stemming from the population played a relatively

large role. The American historian Eric A. Johnson also concluded that 24

per cent of cases taken up by the Gestapo in Krefeld were the result of

denunciations.

If one looks at the particular groups of offences, however, a rather more

complex picture emerges. In the prosecution of cases of ‘racial disgrace’

(sexual relations between ‘Aryans’ and Jews) and other inadmissible contacts

with Jews, as well as of so-called ‘unpatriotic behaviour’ (Heimtu

cke), in

other words, the spreading of rumours, jokes, and so on, the number of

denunciations was quite high, whereas in the case of the pursuit of political

opponents, homosexuals, as well as supporters of the major Christian

denominations and the Jehovah’s Witnesses they played a comparatively

small role.

It is also important to note, as Johnson points out, that

denunciations mostly concerned minor offences, whereas in relation to

‘real’ opponents of the regime, in other words, cases which often had serious

consequences, they were much less frequent. Above all, even if denuncia-

tions were of considerable importance for the day-to-day work of the

Gestapo, in comparative terms the absolute numbers of cases of denuncia-

tion were relatively small. Thus, only a small percentage of the population

volunteered information to the Gestapo. Such cases should not be used to

draw more far-reaching conclusions about the state of ‘German society’.

Thus, although the Gestapo was dependent on the ‘co-operation’ of the

population in the pursuit of certain offences, such as the maintenance of

contacts with Jews, it would be wrong simply to accept Himmler’s vision of

a society where ‘the people do all the informing themselves’.

* Translators’ note: The highest peak in the Harz mounatins.

210 the state protection corps

In relation to the tasks it had been set and its reputation, the Gestapo’s

organization was relatively small. At the beginning of 1934 the Prussian

Gestapo had approximately 1,700 employees, of whom around 700 were

employed in the headquarters. In June 1935 the ﬁgure had risen to 2,700,

with the number employed in headquarters remaining roughly the same.

If one applies these ﬁgures to the Reich as a whole, then there were around

4,200 people employed in the political police in 1935, of whom around 10

per cent were female secretaries. Up until 1937 this number increased to

around 7,000 employees.

Of the Gestapo employees who were employed

in 1937, around three-quarters had worked in various parts of the police

force, 5 per cent had been taken on from other state organizations (such as

the judicial system), and 20 per cent were newly employed, in other words,

mainly party supporters.

The size of the Gestapo varied signiﬁcantly from government district to

government district. Thus, in 1937 the Gestapo ofﬁce in Bielefeld con-

trolled a district of more than 870,000 inhabitants with ﬁfty-three ofﬁcers,

the one in Hildesheim had thirty ofﬁcers controlling around 600,000

people, and the one in Chemnitz had ﬁfty-ﬁve ofﬁcers responsible for

more than a million inhabitants.

However, one should not overlook the

fact that the Gestapo had a relatively large number of informants. So-called

‘trusties’ headed a network of informants, which the Gestapo divided into

various categories based on reliability and importance. Some of these

informants were opponents who had been forced to cooperate with the

regime, others were paid spies.

In his new function Himmler uniﬁed the Gestapo apparatus throughout

the Reich and gave it the same independence from the internal administra-

tion as he had already secured for it in Prussia. The heads of the Gestapo

ofﬁces were supposed to act as ‘desk ofﬁcers’ for political police matters for

their state governments, and also to be bound by their instructions, but this

applied only insofar as ‘instructions to the contrary had not been issued by

the Secret State Police Ofﬁce’. And where there was disagreement, the

Gestapa had the ﬁnal decision as to whether the head of the district Gestapo

ofﬁce should obey the instructions of his state government or not. This

rendered the ‘inclusion’ of the Gestapo in the internal state administration

an absurdity.

The SD, as the party’s intelligence agency, was not directly affected by

the takeover of the police by Himmler in June 1936 and the resultant

reorganization. However, the fact that Heydrich, the head of the SD, was

the state protection corps 211

put in charge of the newly created Security Main Ofﬁce, which was

responsible for the security police, increased his potential for inﬂuence,

even if he was still not permitted to take executive action as head of the

SD.

At the beginning of 1936 Heydrich had already reorganized the SD Main

Ofﬁce within the SS headquarters. Most important was the fact that the

tasks of the Ofﬁce of Domestic Affairs had been divided into ‘ideological

assessment’ (initially under Hermann Behrends, then under Franz Alfred

Six) and ‘assessment of the domestic situation’ (under Reinhard Ho

hn, later

under Otto Ohlendorff ). While the ‘ideological assessment’ concentrated

on those groups that were seen as the main enemies of Nazism and so were

divided into the sections: ‘Freemasons’, ‘Jews’, ‘religious and political

movements’,

the ‘assessment of the domestic situation’ department set

about constructing an elaborate system for information-gathering and re-

porting that went far beyond the surveillance of political opponents and was

designed to cover the entire spectrum of life in the Third Reich. It was

divided into three groups: Economics; Culture—Scholarship—Educa-

tion—Ethnic issues; and Administration and the Law—Party and State—

Higher Education and Students.

By issuing the so-called division-of-functions order, the ‘Combined

Order for the Security Service of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS and for the Secret

State Police of the Head of the Main Ofﬁce of the Security Police and SD’,

on 1 July 1937, Heydrich introduced a detailed demarcation of the functions

of the two organizations.

The SD, in which in the meantime young

committed intellectuals had acquired leadership positions establishing valu-

able contacts to the world of scholarship, and in a number of cases achieving

academic careers,

was to be ‘exclusively’ responsible for the spheres of

scholarship, ethnic matters and folklore, art, education, party and state, the

constitution and administration, foreign affairs, Freemasonry, and clubs and

societies; the Gestapo, on the other hand, was to be ‘exclusively’ responsible

for ‘Marxism, treason, e

migre

s’. As far as the churches, paciﬁsm, Jewry, the

right-wing movement, other groups hostile to the state, the economy, and

the press were concerned, all ‘general and fundamental issues were to be

dealt with by the SD and all individual cases by the Gestapo’.

How, then, from 1936 onwards did the Gestapo carry out its role in

practice? Statistics prepared by Reinhard Mann on the basis of the ﬁles of the

sseldorf Gestapo for the whole period 1933 to 1945 show that 30 per cent

of the cases investigated by the Gestapo concerned the pursuit of banned

212 the state protection corps

organizations, mainly the KPD and SPD (although this area of Gestapo

activity more or less came to a halt during the war); 29 per cent of cases

investigated dealt with publicly deviant behaviour, mainly criticisms of the

regime; 17 per cent with other forms of deviant behaviour, such as the

spreading of banned pamphlets or listening to enemy radio broadcasts; 12

per cent of the investigations involved conventional criminality.

In his

study of the Du

sseldorf ofﬁce Johnson comes to the conclusion that the

Gestapo’s activities concentrated on three groups in particular: Jews, mem-

bers of the Left, as well as opposition priests and members of sects. The

control of other ‘normal’ Germans, with the exception of homosexuals, was

relatively lax, and if they ever got caught up in a Gestapo investigation they

were usually let off with a warning or a minor penalty.

As time went on, however, the focus of its activity shifted. While up until

1935–6 the pursuit of communists had been the ﬁrst priority, in the follow-

ing years this group played a much-reduced role, and for a very simple

reason: by 1936 the communist underground organization had been almost

completely destroyed.

In 1935 the Gestapo had arrested around 14,000

communists, in 1936 11,678, and in 1938 8,068.

Himmler, however, made

no bones about the fact that he intended to continue keeping the commu-

nist functionaries in the camps. For, as he put it in 1937, even if the KPD

and its organizations had ceased to exist, in future ‘a large number of

members of our nation could keep becoming vulnerable to the poison of

Bolshevism’.

After the elimination of the communists, the Gestapo and the SD con-

centrated on the so-called ‘wire-pullers’, the intellectual opposition—Free-

masons, Jews, and politicized priests—on whom Himmler, Heydrich, and

Best had increasingly focused since 1935. Here too, however, there were

signiﬁcant differences in the way these groups were treated.

Freemasons

In the speeches he made during the 1930s Himmler invariably counted the

Freemasons among the Nazis’ arch-enemies and referred to them in the

same breath as the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the politicized priests.

However, the Reichsfu

hrer-SS, who since his youth had been a believer

in the widespread conspiracy theories concerning the Freemasons, did not

specify in these speeches what exactly the allegedly nefarious activity of the

Freemasons consisted of.

the state protection corps 213

In fact, in the meantime he must have come to the conclusion that the

Freemasons posed no threat to the Nazi regime. This assessment was shared

by the experts of the Gestapo and SD: for them, from the mid-1930s

onwards, the combating of Freemasonry was no longer a priority. In

1935, in his inﬂuential series of articles in Das Schwarze Korps, ‘Phases of

Our Struggle’, Heydrich demonstratively referred to Freemasonry as merely

‘an auxiliary organization of Jewry’ and therefore indicated that it was no

longer regarded as a separate threat.

Because of the Nazis’ hostility to Freemasonry, most of the lodges had

already dissolved themselves in 1933 or had been dissolved by the state

governments.

By the summer of 1935 all the associations of Freemasons

had been liquidated.

Former members of lodges were discriminated

against in the Third Reich, for example, if they were employed in the

public sector.

Moreover, as a matter of principle they were excluded

from party membership, which automatically blocked their access to a

wide range of privileged positions.

But there was no systematic persecu-

tion of Freemasons. What is more, the fact that someone was a Freemason

or had previously been one did not generally justify the imposition of

protective custody.

The dwindling signiﬁcance of Freemasonry was reﬂected in the organi-

zational arrangements of the Gestapo and SD. Whereas before 1933 the SD

had kept a special register of Freemasons,

after its move to Berlin at the

beginning of 1935 it established a ‘Museum of Freemasonry’ in which the

items conﬁscated from the lodges, their libraries, and documents were

collected together.

It was being signalled that the ‘problem’ now belonged

to the past. At the beginning of 1936 the SD department originally speciﬁ-

cally devoted to Freemasonry was amalgamated with the desk ofﬁcers

dealing with the Jews and church matters to form a main department

responsible for ‘Ideologies’.

From the summer of 1937 onwards the

Gestapo no longer dealt with this topic. Under the order of 1 July 1937

dealing with the demarcation of functions referred to above, Freemasonry

was allocated entirely to the SD.

Jews

With the destruction of the communist underground appearing to be

imminent, ‘the Jews’ were among those ‘intellectual forces’ referred to in

Himmler’s public speeches who were secretly intriguing against Nazism and

214 the state protection corps

who, from 1935 onwards, were increasingly to be the target of the SS

leadership and the Gestapo. However, for the period before the November

pogrom of 1938 it is impossible to ﬁnd any lengthy anti-Semitic statements

by Himmler. He mostly treated the question of the Jews cursorily and often

in a stereotypical manner along with the other enemies, and without

spending any time on them.

It was only in his major speech to the Reich Peasant Rally in Goslar of

November 1935—in other words, a few weeks after the issuing of the

Nuremberg Laws—that he embarked on a comprehensive anti-Jewish

polemic. Signiﬁcantly, the speech was printed under the title ‘The SS as

an Anti-Bolshevik Combat Organization’, thereby emphasizing the link

between anti-Semitism and ‘anti-Bolshevism’.

Himmler ranged very widely. He began by introducing the farmers

gathered together in Goslar to the Persian Empire of Xerxes I (519–465

bc) in order to explain the moral perniciousness of the Jewish festival of

Purim. Himmler reinterpreted the annual commemoration of the saving of

the Persian Jews from a pogrom—Xerxes had ordered a mass slaughter of

his Jewish enemies—as ‘the radical destruction of an Aryan nation by

Jewish-Bolshevik methods’. Then he described a series of similar ‘tragedies’

in which, however, one could in some cases only ‘sense [ . . . ] that here our

age-old enemy, the Jew, in some form or through one of his organizations

had his bloody hands in the affair’. Himmler’s list included: ‘the tireless

executioner’s sword wielded at Cannstatt and Verden’ (in other words, the

mass killing of Alemannen in 746 by Karlmann and of the Saxons by

Charlemagne in 782); the medieval and early modern witch trials (‘We

can visualize the ﬁres burning at the stakes on which tens of thousands of the

martyred and tortured bodies of mothers and girls of our nation burnt to

ashes’); ‘the courts of the Inquisition which depopulated Spain’; the Thirty

Years War; the French Revolution (‘a revolution organized solely by the

order of Freemasons, this marvellous Jewish organization’); as well as the

Russian Revolution of 1917.

When looking through his manuscript, Himmler may have had doubts

about whether his arguments would stand up. The idea that Jewish string-

pullers should have manipulated Charlemagne, the ‘Slaughterer of the

Saxons’, of all people and should have conceived the Spanish Inquisition

must have been hard to take, even for hard-line anti-Semites. Moreover, by

referring to Persians, Spaniards, French, and Russians he had extended the

list of those who had suffered from Jewish machinations so much that the

the state protection corps 215

central role of the Teutons as the ‘victims’ of the Jewish world conspiracy

had become insufﬁciently clear. Thus, he asked his listeners not to succumb

‘to excessive Aryan and German objectivity’ by focusing on the details but

rather to concentrate on ‘the general point’.

During the ﬁrst years of the Third R eich neither the Gestapo nor the SD

played a prominent role in Jewish persecution. During this period the

Jewish policy of the Nazi regime was initially driven decisively by the subtle

interaction of party activists and state legislation. The party started ‘actions’

against the Jews, such as the boycott of 1 April 1933 and the riots of spring

and summer 1935, or the pogrom of November 1938, to which the state

bureaucracy then responded with measures in order further to restrict the

lives of the Jewish minority. As far as the party was concerned, apart from

the staff of the Fu

hrer’s Deputy under Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann, a

key role was played by a number of particularly anti-Semitic Gauleiters

(Goebbels in Berlin, Grohe

in Cologne, Streicher in Nuremberg), while the

state operations were controlled by the Reich Interior Ministry.

The role of the Gestapo in this sphere was above all to keep the activities

of Jewish organizations under surveillance

and to carry out state measures.

However, the Gestapo became increasingly unwilling to wait for laws or

decrees, and began initiating such measures by issuing its own edicts. In

January 1935, for example, the Gestapo ordered returning e

migre

stobe

interned in ‘re-education camps’, which effectively meant concentration

camps, as was made clear in a regulation issued a few weeks later.

February 1935 the Gestapa banned all events in which support was sought

for Jews to remain in Germany.

Another example was the ﬂag ban of

February 1935, which forbade Jews to raise the swastika; it was not legally

conﬁrmed until September 1935 with the Reich Flag Law.

Himmler’s involvement in such bans varied. In July 1936, for example, he

signed a directive that required requests for licences to run a pub to make it

clear whether the applicant was a Jew,

and on 15 June 1936 he informed

the state secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry, Hans Pfundtner, of

Hitler’s request that in future Jews should not be allowed to use German

ﬁrst names. However, the Interior Ministry did not act on this for another

eighteen months.

In general, Himmler left the implementation of anti-Jewish measures to

Heydrich, who during the 1930s became the central ﬁgure in the Jewish

policy of the Gestapo and SD. Heydrich’s role was increased by the fact that

ring, in his position as head of the ‘Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange

216 the state protection corps

Staff ’ (the precursor of the Four Year Plan organization), assigned him the

task of setting up a ‘Foreign Exchange Search Ofﬁce’. This new responsi-

bility enabled Heydrich in future to move against Jews who were under

‘suspicion of emigrating’ on the grounds of alleged breaches of foreign-

exchange regulations.

This appointment was the ﬁrst of a whole series of

responsibilities involving Jewish persecution which the Reich Marshall

assigned to the head of the security police and SD during the coming

years. This created two competing chains of command involving Jewish

policy: Hitler–HimmlerHeydrich and HitlerGo

ringHeydrich. The

Reichsfu

hrer-SS was thereby in danger of being excluded from the deci-

sion-making process in the event of his proving insufﬁciently active on the

anti-Semitic front.

As far as Jewish persecution was concerned, both the Gestapo and the SD

concentrated above all on encouraging emigration and preventing all

attempts at ‘assimilation’ by German Jews. A Gestapa report of November

1934 formulated this as a programme, stating: ‘it is the aim of the state police

to encourage Zionism as much as possible and support its efforts at pursuing

emigration.’

However, for this purpose it was necessary to know the

numbers involved and who was to be supported. Thus, from 1935 onwards

Gestapo ofﬁces recorded the names of Jews domiciled in their districts, a

process that had been substantially concluded by 1939.

Meanwhile, the SD’s Jewish department had acquired a group of young,

self-conﬁdent ofﬁcials—Dieter Wisliceny, Herbert Hagen, Theodor Dan-

necker, and Adolf Eichmann—who, in the course of 1937, set about devel-

oping their own comprehensive version of Jewish policy. Their intention

was to harmonize the various and sometimes conﬂicting aims of Jewish

persecution—expulsion, forcing the Jews out of the economy and society,

and plundering them. This group believed that its position as the brains

trust for Jewish policy had been conﬁrmed by Heydrich’s ‘functions order’ of

1 July 1937, in which he had assigned all Jewish matters to the SD.

From now on the SD in creasingly involved itself in the practice of

Jewish persec ution, which was really the task of the Gestapo. Wh en the

GermanPolish Agreement on Upper Silesia of 1922 came to an end in

July 1937 and the Nazi regime could now ap ply the anti-Jewish legisla tion

to this part of the country as well, Eichmann, who had been sent to

Breslau a few weeks before, carried out vital preliminary work there .

After the so-called Ansc hluss with Austria this SD tactic of trying to

the state protection corps 217

acquire an executive role came to fruition with its assumption of auxiliary

tasks for the Gestapo.

The churches

Unlike in the case of the Jews, there was one group among those Himmler

deﬁned as enemies that aroused in him something akin to passion: Chris-

tians. And that was particularly the case when he was speaking to closed

meetings of members of the SS, when he did not need to pay any attention

to wider considerations of policy regarding the churches.

Thus, in 1938 he declared: ‘Christian doctrine has been responsible for

the destruction of every nation. A religion which (a) sees women as sinful,

(b) marriage as the lesser evil—it is at least better than the alternative, such

teaching is in the long run absolutely liable to bring every nation to the

grave.’ Christianity, according to Himmler, was ‘the destroyer of every

nation’.

On the occasion of the transfer of the expropriated headquarters

of the Order of Teutonic Knights to the SS by the city of Vienna in 1939 he

informed his listeners that he had ‘the ﬁrm intention’ ‘thoroughly to break

with’ two developments that had had fatal repercussions for German histo-

ry: ‘in the ﬁrst place, with a doctrine that in our view is wrong for Teutons,

the fateful doctrine of an Asiatic Christianity, and secondly, with the

squandering of blood [ . . . ] caused by the negation of the clan and the

negation of the family.’

He warned the Oberabschnitt leaders on 9 June 1942: ‘We shall have to

deal with Christianity in a much tougher way than hitherto. We must sort

out this Christianity; it has plagued us throughout our history and weakened

us in every conﬂict. If our generation doesn’t do it then I believe it could go

on for a long time. We must face up to the need to deal with it.’

Three

months later, on 16 September 1942, in a speech to SS and police leaders in

Hegewald, his Ukrainian summer headquarters, he described Christianity as

‘a perverse ideology that is alien to life’, because ‘in a typically oriental way

it equates women with sin and has regarded procreation as legitimate only if

a priest has given his blessing; then it was just about all right. But—and this

was the strongest moral impulse of the Catholic Church—every sexual act

between a man and woman in which the object was not to have a child or in

which it was prevented was declared a mortal sin.’

For the sake of outward appearances, however, Himmler tried to create

the impression that the SS was neutral in its attitude towards the Christian

218 the state protection corps

denominations. Thus, in January 1934 he expressed his displeasure at having

read in a newspaper report that ‘an SS formation has taken part in the

enthronement of a state bishop’. Himmler described this as ‘tasteless’ and

‘incorrect’, since ‘the SS members who had been ordered to participate

would have been thereby exposed to moral conﬂict’. A ‘politicization of

religious life does not accord with our ideology. Even the appearance of it

must be avoided at all costs.’

In October 1934 he insisted that clergy and,

in March 1935, theology students must quit the SS.

In September 1935 he

banned SS members from ‘participating in leadership roles’ in religious

communities, in particular with the German Christians.

Himmler did

not intend to reform Christianity in Nazi Germany; rather, he wanted to

draw a clear dividing-line against Christian communities of any kind. In

November 1937 he even went so far as to ban SS members in uniform from

taking part in religious ceremonies.

This policy of distancing himself set certain limits to attacks on the

churches. In September 1934 Himmler issued an SS order ‘strictly’ banning

‘any disturbance or any tactless behaviour during the religious ceremonies of

all denominations’.

In October 1935 he reassured Hitler, who was evi-

dently concerned about the well-known hostile attitude of the SS to the

churches, that ‘he valued highly peaceful relations between state and

church’.

In July 1937 he noted in an SS order that he had had to expel a

Platoon Leader (Scharfu

hrer) from the SS for ‘a speech that was riddled with

tactless remarks about Church matters’.

A month earlier, during a course

of ‘ideological indoctrination’, he had banned ‘any attacks on the person of

Christ’, since ‘such attacks or the abuse of Christ as a Jew [are] unworthy of

us’ and ‘deﬁnitely historically untrue’; which showed that he shared the

notion of an ‘Aryan Jesus’ that was widespread in vo

lkisch circles.

He also

declined to attack Christianity publicly as ‘Jewish-Roman’.

In 1941 he

wrote to a corporal in the Wehrmacht, who wanted to become a theology

student, that he was unable to grant his wish ‘to remain a member of the SS

as a theologian on principle’. The basic regulation had been passed in order

to keep the SS ‘out of the conﬂicts among the religious denominations’.

The fact that the SS leadership did not demand that its members leave

their churches, however much this was considered desirable, ﬁtted in with

this public image of neutrality vis-a

-vis the churches. At the end of 1938

21.9 per cent of SS members described themselves, like Himmler, as

‘believers in God’ ( gottgla

ubig); in other words, they did not belong to any

Christian denomination. Signiﬁcantly, the ﬁgure was 53.6 per cent for the

the state protection corps 219