Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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armed SS formation, and in the case of the Death’s Head units as much as 69

per cent.

Ofﬁcially Himmler emphasized that he left it up to his members

whether or not they belonged to a Christian denomination. In 1936 he

advised the leader of the Du

sseldorf Oberabschnitt, Fritz Weitzel, not to ask

SS leaders during their indoctrination course to produce essays on the topic

of ‘How I Came to Leave the Church’. He considered that ‘dangerous’;

instead, he suggested ‘Is Belief in God the Same Thing as Membership of a

Religious Denomination?’

In February 1937 he told the Gruppenfu

hrer

that he was strongly against forcing people to leave the church—it should

not be made into a ‘sport’ within the SS.

In 1937 he wrote to a pastor, in reply to a query: ‘Every SS man is free to

be a member of a church or not. It is a personal matter, which he has to

answer for to God or his conscience.’ SS men should not, however, be

atheists, for ‘that is the only world- or religious view that is not tolerated

within the SS’.

‘I have nothing to do with denominations,’ he told army

ofﬁcers in July 1944, ‘I leave that to each individual. But I have never

tolerated an atheist in the ranks of the SS. Every member has a deep faith in

God, in what my ancestors called in their language Waralda, the ancient

one, the one who is mightier than we are.’

At the Gruppenfu

hrer meeting in November 1936 he stated that, in

particular, they should not ‘rip out from old people’s hearts what they

consider holy’, and illustrated this with a personal example: ‘My father

[Gerhard Himmler had died that same year] was—in accordance with the

tradition of our family—a convinced Christian, in his case a convinced

Catholic. He knew my attitude very well. But we never discussed religion

apart from a conversation about the political harmfulness and perniciousness

of the Christian churches, about which we both agreed. I never challenged

his viewpoint and he didn’t mine.’ He could ‘sympathize’ with someone

who said: ‘I’ve got to christen my child for the sake of my parents. By all

means. Go ahead. One can’t change 70-year-olds.’

However, the anti-Christian remarks by Hi mmler quot ed above, which

were based on fundamental ideological considerations, indicate that his

repeated comments about religious tolerance in the SS were purely tacti-

cal. When, at the end of 1940, he remarked in a spee ch that after the war

he envis aged a ‘clear and peaceful separation of church and state’,

in fact

he did not co nsider that to be the ﬁnal goal of Nazi church policy; in

reality he was bent on the destruction of Christian ity, which was opposed

to his biological-vo

lkisch aims. But in this case the pure doctrine could not

220 the state protection corps

be implemented; desp ite various anti-church initiatives, the regime could

never bring itself to make the removal of the Christian churches and

Christian doctrine ofﬁcial policy. And so Himmler was obliged to be

cautious.

During the ﬁrst years of the regime the Gestapo and SD concentrated

their surveillance and persecution measures against the churches above all

on the Catholics. Although the Nazi state and the Vatican had made a Reich

Concordat in July 1933, which guaranteed the existence of the Catholic

Church, two years after the seizure of power the radical elements within the

Nazi movement set about altering the status quo to their advantage. Apart

from Hess and his chief of staff, Martin Bormann, above all Reichsleiter

Alfred Rosenberg and Himmler were the key ﬁgures among these anti-

church hardliners. As the elimination of the Christian churches was not

opportune, their strategy in the medium term was to remove the privileged

position of the churches as far as their status as public institutions was

concerned. Reduced to the status of private institutions, the churches

were to be gradually excluded from public life.

Himmler, however, was rarely involved publicly in the anti-church

measures of the Gestapo and SD. He left this sphere largely to Heydrich,

who was in full agreement with Himmler on church matters. Himmler’s

public caution was probably largely determined by his unwillingness to

appear as a radical opponent of the churches and for the SS in general to

be equated with anti-church fundamentalism. Ironically, between 1935 and

1941 the SD department dealing with church matters was headed by a

former Catholic priest, Albert Hartl. Having joined the party in 1933,

Hartl ﬁnally burnt his bridges in 1934 and joined the SD. Because of a

denunciation his position within the church had become untenable.

In 1935 the Nazi state began to target the Catholic religious orders with a

wave of criminal trials, which were accompanied by a massive anti-church

campaign in the press. The focus of the investigations was twofold: ﬁrst,

infringements of the currency laws (evidence was provided by the cross-

frontier ﬁnancial transactions made by various orders); secondly, alleged

sexual misdemeanours involving members of the orders. The investigations

concerning currency violations started at the beginning of 1935 and were

systematically expanded in March 1935. The Gestapo and SD were actively

involved, and utilized the searches of monasteries in particular to conﬁscate

all sorts of material. The actual trials were prepared centrally by a special

department of the Berlin prosecutor’s ofﬁce. The ﬁrst trials took place in

the state protection corps 221

May 1935. By the end of 1935 almost seventy priests and members of orders

had been found guilty in thirty trials. Some trials continued into the war.

The prosecuting authorities, however, considered that the cases of al-

leged sexual misdemeanours by Catholic priests and members of orders

were of far greater propaganda value. From spring 1935 onwards the

prosecuting authorities, the criminal police and the Gestapo, collected

material concerning alleged homosexual activity, making extensive use of

the material that had been conﬁscated in the cases involving currency

offences.

In 1935 the Gestapo set up a special commando in its section

dealing with cases of homosexuality.

The SD also became involved in

these.

The comprehensive investigations led to a wave of trials, lasting,

with a pause during the summer Olympics, until the summer of 1937. In the

end there were 250 so-called ‘morality trials’, in which more than 200

members of Catholic orders, mostly laymen, were convicted.

In addition, three more lines of attack on the churches emerged during

the course of 1935. In the middle of that year the Nazi state restricted

Catholic youth organizations to purely religious activities,

and through

regulations issued by the Reich Press Chamber a large part of the Catholic

press was eliminated during 1935–6.

Finally, the party began a campaign,

initially in Bavaria but then in other states, which aimed at encouraging

parents no longer to send their children to church schools (in which,

although they were state schools, the churches had traditionally enjoyed a

considerable amount of inﬂuence), but instead to ‘community schools’, in

other words, state schools without a denominational ethos.

The Gestapo

and SD also had a hand in these measures.

The surveillance of the Protestant Church was, by contrast, of secondary

importance for the Gestapo and SD.

During 1935–6 the regime had

initially attempted, with the help of loyal German Christians, to get control

of the state churches and to establish a centralized Reich church regime.

This, however, failed in the face of internal church opposition. There were

major conﬂicts between the German Christians and the emerging opposi-

tion movement of the Confessing Church, which were resolved only by

Hans Kerrl, who was appointed Reich Church minister in July 1935. There

was a fundamental difference of viewpoint between Kerrl on the one hand,

and Himmler and the anti-church hardliners on the other. Whereas Kerrl

wished in the ﬁrst instance to strengthen the German Christians, the hard-

liners considered this an unwarranted enhancement of the Christian ele-

ments. They wanted rather to distance themselves from all Christian

222 the state protection corps

groups.

The Gestapo and SD thus kept out of these church conﬂicts;

instead, they tried to undermine Kerrl’s position within the regime by

tenacious intrigue, which was assisted not least by the gathering of informa-

tion from Kerrl’s ministry.

In any case, Himmler succeeded, together with

Hess and the support of Goebbels among others, in preventing Kerrl’s plans

for the coordination of the Protestant Church.

‘Kerrl wants to conserve the

Church, we want to liquidate it’, noted Goebbels in February 1937, after a

long conversation with Himmler and Wilhelm Stuckart on the eve of a

discussion on the Obersalzberg about the churches issue. And he concluded

that ‘the differences between us are not just tactical but fundamental’.

In July 1937 there was a change in the regime’s policy towards the churches.

The papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (‘With Burning Anxiety’) removed

all illusions that the Catholic Church would submit to the regime’s church

policies without a ﬁght. And, as far as the Protestant Churches were

concerned, the leadership of the regime had to recognize that the German

Christians did not have the potential to coordinate the church from within.

However, the impending shift to an expansionist foreign policy made it

advisable to make peace on the home front. Therefore Hitler gradually

withdrew from church policy. The fundamental reorientation of the relation-

ship between the Nazi state and the churches sought by radical party elements

was postponed. In view of this situation, the birthday gift Himmler presented

to Hitler on 20 Aprilwassigniﬁcant:hegavehisFu

hrer Otto Rahn’s book

Lucifer’s Courtiers, a history of heretics, bound in the ﬁnest pigskin.

The strategy of forcing the churches out of public life by a series of

measures was continued, however. Thus, during the years 1937 to 1939 the

Gestapo gradually banned the Catholic youth organizations, often on the

basis of ‘information’ provided by the SD, because they had not adhered to

the ban on taking part in non-religious activities. It refrained, however,

from spectacular actions, a tactical move that was also evident when

Himmler introduced further measures against Catholic institutions.

When, in April 1937, Kerrl’s suggestion that the Catholic Young Men’s

Associations should be banned was passed on to Himmler, he told the

security police to seek Hitler’s opinion before taking action.

In the autumn of 1937 Himmler got to see the internal minutes of the

Fulda Conference of Catholic bishops for the ﬁrst time, and so was in-

formed about the proceedings of what was the highest-level committee of

the German Catholic Church.

As a ‘sign of close cooperation’ he allowed

the state protection corps 223

Heydrich to pass them on to Kerrl during a conference dealing with church

matters at the beginning of November.

Apart from such individual suc-

cesses, however, despite all their attempts, despite their spies and listening

devices, the Gestapo and SD were poorly informed about the internal

discussions being carried on at the top of the German Catholic Church.

On the other hand, on Hitler’s orders the Gestapo devoted a lot of

attention to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the small faith community of so-called

‘Serious Bible Students’, who numbered approximately 35,000.

The

Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to take part in elections, to give the Hitler

salute, to join Nazi organizations, or to perform military service.

All these

things were incompatible with their strict religious commandments. The

Bible Students were banned in Prussia

100

and dismissed from public service

as early as June 1933.

101

But despite the ban the group continued their

missionary work in several places.

102

In the course of 1936 the Gestapo increased its persecution of the Jeho-

vah’s Witnesses, with torture being used during their interrogations.

103

The ﬁrst nationwide wave of arrests took place in August and September

1936.

104

The Bible Students reorganized themselves in secret, and in De-

cember 1937 distributed leaﬂets in a number of places, but the subsequent

comprehensive wave of arrests in practice led to the destruction of the whole

organization. Since the Jehovah’s Witnesses consistently refused to perform

military service, they were persecuted particularly harshly during the war.

105

In 1936, as part of his anti-church policy, Himmler gave the SD a ‘special

project’ of a peculiar nature. This was the ‘Special Witch Project’ (Hexen-

Sonderauftrag), with which Himmler endeavoured to ﬁnd out the extent of

witch-hunting in the past.

106

This was prompted by the public row caused

by the 1935 German Peasant Calendar issued by the Reich Food Estate,

controlled by R ichard Walther Darre

, who shared Himmler’s views. This

had referred to the ‘nine million [ . . . ] ﬁghters for justice, champions of the

faith, heretics, and witches who had been murdered, tortured to death, and

burnt’ at the instigation of the Christian churches.

107

In his speech to the

Goslar Peasants’ Rally Himmler had alluded to the row that this had caused:

‘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 as a result of the witch trials.’

108

It is possible that he even believed

one of his own ancestors had been burnt as a witch.

109

224 the state protection corps

In any event, Himmler considered it a unique opportunity to catalogue

all the material dealing with the persecution of witches that was scattered in

numerous archives in Germany, and use it to mount a propaganda campaign

against the churches, calling them to account for their historical responsibil-

ity for this mass murder. A task of historical importance for the SS!

To begin with the task was given to the ‘SS Literature Section’ at the

German Library in Leipzig, an offshoot of the SD, which from 1936

onwards had been supervised by its Central Department I, 3. After the

establishment of the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce in 1939 the H [Hexe]

Special Project was transferred to the Department for Researching the

Opposition under Franz Six. It had fourteen full-time employees, and this

team set about systematically researching the extensive literature and exam-

ining every case of witch persecution in the German archives. The re-

searches were carried out clandestinely and were continued until 1944.

Their results were contained in 33,846 pages of data, which together formed

a substantial ‘Witch File’.

Himmler also commissioned the author Friedrich Norfolk, who was a

full-time employee of Six’s department, to write a historical novel on the

subject of the persecution of witches, and also requested him to write ‘a

large number of shorter H[exen]-stories of 60 to 100 pages’.

110

Herbert

Blank, a ‘special prisoner of the RFSS’ in Sachsenhausen on account of his

work for Otto Strasser who was by profession an author of historical novels,

was given the task of studying witch-trial records in his cell and of writing

short stories on the basis of these.

111

A picture book and a ﬁlm on the topic

were also planned, as well as a serious academic series.

112

In the end, however, this huge project was basically restricted to the

gathering of material. There was no signiﬁcant scholarly work done on the

material and no substantial programme of publications. Whether this was

because the people involved were not in a position (or not willing) to

produce more, or whether Himmler found himself prevented from advanc-

ing the project on the grounds of church policy, is unclear.

The criminal police

In May 1944, in a speech to Wehrmacht generals, Himmler confessed:

In the past and right up to the presen t day I have done many things—I admit th at

quite openly—which were not permissible under the existing laws, but needed to

the state protection corps 225

be done on the basis of the laws of reason and common sense. Naturally, in some

cases I had no authority under the law to arrest a criminal who had not committed

an offence. The law laid down that I, acting as the police, had to wait until this man,

who had already carried out three burglaries and mayb e had killed two people in

the process and had done his ﬁfteen years in gaol, was caught in the act or had

committed a new offence.

113

By stating this principle of neutralizing the criminal before he could commit

a crime, Himmler described with disarming logic the programme on which

he embarked in 1936 to reorientate the criminal police (Kripo) towards a

preventive form of combating crime, and in doing so he was guided by the

utopian vision of a ‘national community without criminals’.

With the issuing of the ‘New Organization of the Criminal Police’ on 20

September 1936 Himmler transferred to the Prussian State Criminal Police

Department ‘the practical direction of the police’ in all the federal states.

The logical next step of transforming this ofﬁce into the Reich Criminal

Police Department occurred on 15 July 1937. The existing criminal police

apparatus was now controlled centrally as a Reich criminal police service,

organized hierarchically, and uniﬁed through a system of regional and

district criminal police departments.

114

Many of the measures undertaken during Himmler’s regime resulted in a

modernization of the criminal police, such as had already been demanded by

many experts since the 1920s. Training was uniﬁed and centralized, a leader-

ship college was created for the security police as well as a criminal police

college in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin.

115

So-called Reich centres

were created in the Reich Criminal Police Department for each type of crime

(capital crimes, burglary, counterfeiting, and so on), which concentrated above

all on serial offences committed at the national level and on particularly serious

cases. An ‘Institute of Criminal Technology’

116

was set up and technical

centres were established in the provinces for routine tasks. Considerable

emphasis was placed on the efﬁcient gathering and transmission of data.

117

From 1937 on Himmler appointed Inspectors of the Security Police and

SD throughout the Reich, the majority of whom belonged to the Gestapo

and SD and were intended to increase the effectiveness of the two agen-

cies.

118

However, the aim of amalgamating the criminal police and the

Gestapo to form the security police was only partially realized. Although

numerous criminal police ofﬁcers were transferred to the Gestapo to deal

with its shortage of experts in the detection of crime, there was neither a

routine exchange of personnel between the two branches of the security

226 the state protection corps

police nor was there a single career track for the members of the security

police. Instead, the two branches developed independent images and be-

came rivals, a rivalry that was encouraged by Himmler in that he allowed

both to pursue particular ‘delinquents’ such as homosexuals, ‘asocials’, and

so-called ‘racial offenders’ in competition with one another. There is

evidence for believing that in the process of this competition the more

brutal methods of the Gestapo rubbed off on the Kripo.

119

The uniﬁcation, centralization, and modernization of the criminal police

created the preconditions for shifting the focus of its work, as indicated, to

the prevention of crime. In 1933 the regime had already introduced ‘pre-

ventive custody’ for repeat offenders. However, this measure had been

restricted to a few hundred people who had to serve their time in concen-

tration camps. At the beginning of 1937 Himmler decided considerably to

increase the number of offenders under preventive custody. He told Wehr-

macht ofﬁcers in January that,

in view of the fact that I consider criminality in G ermany is still far too high, I am

going to lock up far more career criminals than hitherto after they have committed

a few offences, say three or four, and then not let them out again. We, and

particularly we with our sentimental humanitarian views and inadequate laws,

can no longer justify letting these people loose on humanity, especially these

murderers, people who commit robberies, car thefts etc., who cost us an arm and

a leg to chase after them.

120

A follow-up telex to the Prussian State Criminal Ofﬁce of 23 February

1937 stated that ‘the population was seriously disturbed’ by ‘robberies,

systematic burglaries, and serious sex crimes’, and Himmler ordered that

2,000 ‘unemployed professional and habitual criminals should be immedi-

ately arrested and conﬁned in concentration camps’.

121

This action was

carried out in March 1937, and 2,000 men with previous convictions were

in fact arrested and conﬁned in camps. The number of ‘preventive prison-

ers’ quintupled as a result of the action; preventive custody was no longer an

exception but became routine.

122

The action of March 1937 represented the prelude to the escalation of

preventive criminal policy, which was also racially charged.

123

For the

transition to the combating of crime through prevention was justiﬁed in

biological terms. According to the most inﬂuential criminologists and their

colleagues, who called themselves ‘criminological biologists’, criminality

was above all genetically determined. Thus it was necessary to ‘eliminate’

the state protection corps 227

those marginal social groups who had been made out to be the bearers of

‘asocial’ genes and who therefore had a tendency to criminality. The

combating of criminality was thus a matter of race, and was placed in the

service of Nazi ideology. At the beginning of 1938 a Central Ofﬁce for

Genealogical Research on Criminals was established in the Reich Criminal

Police Department.

124

The implementation of preventive criminal police action was based on

the ‘Fundamental Decree Concerning the Preventive Combating of Crime

by the Police’ issued by the Reich Interior Minister on 14 December 1937,

which expressly referred to the results of research in criminal biology.

125

The preventive combating of crime was to be secured in two ways: ﬁrst,

through ‘the systematic police surveillance’ of those with previous convic-

tions, for example through police restrictions on residence, bans on making

contact, imposition of abstinence from alcohol, and so on; secondly through

the extended use of ‘preventive custody’. These measures were to be

applied not only to those who had been legally convicted but also to people

who had been deemed ‘asocial’.

126

While in January 1938 the criminal police prepared a major action to take

thousands of ‘asocials’ into custody, Himmler ordered the Gestapo to take

action independently against ‘work-shy’ persons, a further example of the

way in which he put the Kripo under pressure through competition under

the security police umbrella. He ordered the labour exchanges to report to

the Gestapo all those who were able-bodied and who had twice rejected job

offers, or had started work but then left it without good reason. The action

lasted from 21 to 30 April and resulted in 2,000 more prisoners being sent to

Buchenwald.

127

The criminal police began its asocial operation (‘Work-shy Reich’) on 13

June. In a telex of 1 June 1938 Heydrich had ordered the regional Kripo

ofﬁces within a week ‘to take at least 200 male able-bodied persons (aso-

cials)’ into police preventive custody in their area. They should focus above

all on tramps, beggars, ‘Gypsies and people who are travelling around in a

Gypsy-like way’, and pimps, as well as ‘persons who have committed many

previous offences such as resisting arrest, bodily harm, affray, trespass, etc.

and have thereby demonstrated that they are unwilling to ﬁt in with the

national community’.

128

The decree of 1 June had justiﬁed the operation not simply on the grounds

that ‘criminality has its roots in the asocial’, but also cited a second motive: the

rigorous implementation of the Four Year Plan, which did not permit ‘asocial

228 the state protection corps

people to evade work and thereby sabotage the Four Year Plan’. In fact the

measure had been prompted by Himmler’s Four-Year-Plan representative,

Ulrich Greifelt; it belongs within the context of the compulsory transition

from a labour market to a regime of ‘labour deployment’ in order thereby to

alleviate the alarming labour shortage resulting from rearmament.

129

Signiﬁ-

cantly, the timing of the action coincided with the construction of produc-

tion facilities in the concentration camps for which workers were required.

Moreover, ‘Work-shy Reich’ may well have been intended to have a dis-

ciplining and intimidating effect on the whole workforce as an accompani-

ment to the introduction of civil conscription, which occurred on 22 June

1938.

130

On 1 June Heydrich also ordered that in the same week ‘all male Jews in

each criminal police district who have been punished with a term of

imprisonment of more than one month shall be taken into police preventive

custody’. Obviously, the aim was thereby to associate part of the Jewish

minority with the milieu of asocials and criminals, a trend that is also

apparent in press propaganda during these weeks.

131

The raids on ‘asocial’ marginal groups continued during the following

months. At the end of 1938 12,921 people were in preventive custody and

3,231 persons were under systematic surveillance.

132

Although we do not

possess reliable criminal statistics for the whole period from 1933 to 1945,

there is nevertheless some evidence that the rate of criminality did in fact

decline during the years after 1933. The rigorous combating of criminality,

in particular the arrest of ‘potential’ offenders, will presumably have con-

tributed to this. What was decisive, however, was the fact that with the

ending of the world economic crisis the enormous increase in the rate of

criminality during the years 1930–3 reverted to a normal level.

133

In the course of the measures against ‘asocials’ the police also increasingly

took action against the Gypsies. They belonged to the groups who, during

the raids of 1938, became a particular target of the criminal police.

134

previous years the Gypsies had already been subject to increased surveillance

and discrimination by the authorities, and since 1935 the local governments

of various big cities had begun to conﬁne Gypsies in special closed camps.

135

From the mid-1930s onwards, however, the Nazi system had begun to place

Gypsy persecution on a new foundation. The origins of the ‘Gypsy plague’

with regard to their alleged ‘genetic roots’ were now to be tackled and dealt

the state protection corps 229