Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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While this basic issue was being fought over, the headquarters of this

uniﬁed organization of repression began to take shape. In July 1939

Heydrich announced the creation of a Reich Security Main Ofﬁce, which

he based on a plan drawn up by Schellenberg, who was also responsible for

the title; and on 27 September 1939 Himmler ofﬁcially established it by

issuing an edict.

The outbreak of war, however, prevented the realization of Heydrich’s

and Schellenberg’s far-reaching ambitions. In the ﬁnal analysis, what

emerged was an organizational torso; lawyers and SD leaders were

employed side by side and the SD continued to be ﬁnanced by the Reich

Treasurer of the NSDAP. Himmler, however, did not give up the idea of a

‘state protection corps’, and in 1941–2 attempted to realize his aim with the

aid of a ‘Fu

hrer Edict concerning the SS and Police’, but without success.

The Reich Security Main Ofﬁce was initially divided into six—from

March 1941, seven—Ofﬁces or A

mter. Apart from the Administration

Ofﬁce that initially had one and then two departments, the Reich Security

Main Ofﬁce was composed of the Gestapo (Ofﬁce IV), the criminal police

(V), SD Home Affairs (III), the SD’s foreign intelligence service (VI), as well

as the Ofﬁce for Research into and the Combating of Opponents (to begin

with Ofﬁce II, then Ofﬁce VII). There were major changes in March 1941 ,

not only as a result of the division of the Administration Ofﬁce but above all

because of the transfer of responsibilities from Ofﬁce II (VII) to other

Ofﬁces.

During the ﬁrst years of the war the ﬁve operational Ofﬁces of the RSHA

were organized as follows: Ofﬁce IV, the old Secret State Police Ofﬁce

(Gestapa), which continued to be under the direction of Heinrich Mu

ller,

contained ﬁve departments—A: political opponents; B: religious confes-

sions, Jews, Freemasons, e

migre

s, paciﬁsts; C: protective custody; D: occu-

pied territories; and E: counter-intelligence.

The reorganization of the

RSHA in March 1941 had a major impact on Ofﬁce IV. A new department

for Churches and Jews was created. This was above all the result of the fact

that the churches’ department in the Research Ofﬁce (VII) had been

disbanded and its work was now to be continued by the Gestapo. In the

course of this reorganization Eichmann’s section ‘Emigration and Evacuation’

was now transferred from department IV D4 to the newly formed department

IV B4 ( Jewish affairs/evacuation affairs).

Ofﬁce V, under Arthur Nebe (which was identical with the Reich

Criminal Police Ofﬁce), initially consisted of six departments, which were

470 repression in the reich

consolidated into four in March 1941: crime policy and prevention; opera-

tions; police records and tracing; and the Institute of Criminal Technology.

The establishment of an Institute of Criminal Biology in December 1941

underlined the great importance that the Kripo continued to assign to

prevention based on ‘the biology of heredity’. Finally, in 1943 an Institute

of Criminal Medicine was established, based in Vienna.

Ofﬁce III (SD Home Affairs), under Otto Ohlendorf, which essentially

emerged from Central Department II1 (Assessment of the Various Spheres

of National Life) of the SD Main Ofﬁce, consisted of four departments

responsible for issues of ethnicity, legal and constitutional matters, culture,

and the economy. The SD Home Affairs Ofﬁce produced the ‘Reports from

the Reich’, the detailed monthly reports on the population’s ‘mood and

bearing’, and had the task of watching out for developments in the individ-

ual ‘spheres of life’—such as culture, the economy or ‘ethnic matters’

(Volkstum)—that ran counter to Nazi aims and reporting them to the

appropriate authorities.

Ofﬁce VI (SD Foreign Affairs), the successor to Ofﬁce III of the SD Main

Ofﬁce, was the largest Ofﬁce in the RSHA, with a total of eight departments

and thirty-eight sections,

and was headed by Heinz Jost. Born in 1904,he

was a lawyer by profession, had been a party member since 1927 , and was a

senior ofﬁcial in the SD.

Nevertheless, the foreign department of the SD

achieved only modest successes during the ﬁrst two years of the war.

It succeeded in building networks of agents in the important neutral

countries, namely Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, as well as in

Italy, Germany’s ally, and it worked closely with the secret services of the

south-east European countries. However, it failed to achieve signiﬁcant

espionage successes against Great Britain, the United States, or the Soviet

Union.

Ofﬁce VII (Research into and the Combating of Opponents) was initially

composed of the departments: Basic Research, Ideological Opponents,

Domestic Issues, and Foreign Issues. In March 1941 the work of Ofﬁce

VII, whose head, Franz Alfred Six, was simultaneously pursuing his aca-

demic ambitions,

was reduced to ‘scholarly’ research on opponents, while

various sections involved in combating opponents using intelligence meth-

ods were transferred to the Gestapo. Others which were involved in the

active investigation of opponents were assigned to the Home Affairs and

Foreign Intelligence Ofﬁces.

repression in the reich 471

Although its research contribution—in other words, the Ofﬁce’s raison

d’e

tre—was in the ﬁnal analysis minimal, the ofﬁcials tasked with dealing

with the various issues were very industrious. In the academic sphere they

exercised considerable inﬂuence on the assessment of qualiﬁcations and on

appointments, and in the occupied territories they pursued a systematic

policy of plunder, ‘acquiring’ libraries, archives, and collections on a large

scale.

The development of the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce was characterized

by a certain amount of fragmentation of responsibilities, which meant that

the pre-war years had seen the work of the Gestapo and the Kripo increas-

ingly overlapping. From now on the Gestapo concentrated on the actual

pursuit of political opponents, which during the war was extended above all

to cover the increasing number of foreigners living in Germany. In view of

the imminent outbreak of war, Heydrich had already considerably restricted

the tasks of the Gestapo through an edict of 31 August 1939. Its engagement

in matters involving the religious confessions, Jews, Freemasons, e

migre

reactionaries, and party affairs was substantially restricted, while the majority

of those cases involving homosexuality and abortion were transferred to the

Kripo.

‘Preventive’ measures using terror directed at ‘asocials’ and crim-

inals were also now largely the responsibility of the criminal police. These

instructions were modiﬁed during the course of the war.

The SD, which in the pre-war period had often acted as an auxiliary

agency of the Gestapo, now tended to withdraw from an executive role.

The Gestapo

A few weeks after the outbreak of war, and with the police reorganization

still going on, Himmler was confronted with his ﬁrst challenge. At 9.20 on

the evening of 9 November 1939 a bomb exploded in the Bu

rgerbra

ukeller

in Munich, killing eight people and injuring numerous others. The explo-

sion occurred only thirteen minutes after Hitler had left the building,

considerably earlier than his programme had envisaged. If he had not altered

his plans he would undoubtedly have fallen victim to the explosion, which

occurred next to the rostrum and had been detonated with the aid of a

timing device. By chance the assassin was arrested on the same evening.

Georg Elser, a joiner, who had prepared and carried out the assassination

attempt on his own, was caught by German frontier guards while trying

472 repression in the reich

to ﬂee to Switzerland, and, after the attack became known, was brought

to Munich.

Himmler and the Gestapo ofﬁcials investigating the affair initially did not

believe Elser’s claim that he had carried out the attack without any outside

help. Instead, they believed that it had been an attack by the British Secret

Service. Himmler had already ofﬁcially committed himself to this account

of the events, and the propaganda covering it was designed accordingly.

Since,ontheverysameday,anSDcommandohadkidnappedtwoBritish

agents, Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, in the

Dutch town of Venlo near the German border, Hitler and Himmler immedi-

ately speculated that they had disrupted a secret operation of the British Secret

Service aimed at removing the dictator and destabilizing the Nazi regime.

As a result, an attempt was made to force Elser to reveal information

about the ‘men behind the scenes’. According to a post-war report by two

Gestapo ofﬁcials, Himmler even interrogated Elser personally in order to

explore the background; in the process he kicked him brutally several times,

abused him, and had him tortured by a Gestapo ofﬁcial in a side room. This

is, in fact, the only example in his whole career of Himmler personally using

physical force.

However, during the night of 13–14 November Elser

undermined Himmler’s assumptions and deductions by explaining in detail

how he had planned and carried out the act on his own.

As a result, Himmler was faced with the threat of being accused of

incompetence in relation to the assassination, on the grounds both of having

led the investigations in the wrong direction and, as the supreme chief

of police in the R eich, of being responsible for the inadequate security

arrangements at the Bu

rgerbra

ukeller that had enabled Elser painstakingly to

assemble his bomb.

On 8 September 1939 the Reich Ministry of Justice issued a brief and terse

press release: ‘The Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Chief of the German Police has

announced that Johann Heinen, of Dessau, was shot on 7.9.1939 for

refusing to cooperate in implementing safety measures required for national

defence. He also had a criminal record for theft.’ The announcement

mentioned two further cases: another person with a previous conviction

who was shot for ‘arson and sabotage’ and a Jehovah’s Witness shot for

‘conscientious objection’.

The Reich Justice Minister, Franz Gu

rtner, was concerned about the

legal grounds for these ‘executions without a trial’. It was not until a few

repression in the reich 473

weeks later that he learned that Hitler himself had ordered the three

shootings and, in the meantime, had ordered the execution of two bank-

robbers, as the courts ‘had not shown themselves equal to the special

wartime conditions’. By January 1940 Hitler had instructed Himmler to

arrange the immediate execution of a total of eighteen criminals, including a

conﬁdence-trickster who had pretended to be a successful U-boat ofﬁcer, a

rapist, a handbag thief who had taken advantage of the blackout, an arsonist,

and sex offenders who had abused children. In some cases sentences had

already been passed on these offenders, in others no trial had yet taken

place.

There was, in fact, no legal basis for these executions; the Gestapo

had nevertheless already developed a standard procedure for them. On

3 September Heydrich had informed the Gestapo branches of the ‘Basic

Principles for Maintaining Internal Security During the War’, which stated,

among other things:

Any atte mpt to undermine the unity of the German people and its determination to

ﬁght must be ruthlessly suppressed. In particular, any person who expresses doub ts

about the victory of the German nation or questions the justiﬁcation for the war is

to be arrested [ . . . ] The Chief of the Security Police must then be informed

without delay and a decision requested on the further treatment of the arrested

persons, since the ruthless liquidation of such elements may be ordered at a high

level [...].

Himmler’s organization was thus entitled to execute anyone arousing such

a suspicion, even in the case of relatively minor offences. The term used to

describe this police licence to kill was ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung).

It was carried out in concentration camps, police prisons, or in work re-

education camps, and later on in the war also in public, for example in

businesses or in public places.

All cases which regional Gestapo ofﬁces

deemed suitable for ‘special treatment’ had to be referred to Himmler. It is

clear that the Reichsfu

hrer made the decision himself, which was ﬁnal, just

as he did in doubtful cases involving the approval of marriage, applications

for re-Germanization, and the punishment of his men for indulging in

banned sexual relations.

Within the territory of the Reich itself ‘special treatment’ was directed

above all against an ‘opposition’ group that the Nazi policy of conquest had

itself created: foreigners living in Germany. By the end of 1939 the party and

state agencies were already engaged in intensive discussions about how the

474 repression in the reich

large numbers of Polish POWs and workers who had been brought into the

Reich should be treated, and above all how they should be kept separate

from the German population. It was clear that people from a subjugated

country who were potentially hostile to Nazi Germany posed a threat.

Propaganda hostile to the regime, the undermining of work discipline,

espionage, but also ordinary criminality could all be anticipated. The

assumed ‘racial inferiority’ of the Poles increased the problem in the eyes

of the regime, and Himmler made it his task not only to develop the

surveillance of foreigners into a new focus for the work of the Gestapo,

but to do so in particular in racial terms.

A few days after the outbreak of war Himmler asked Hitler how they

should proceed if Polish POWs made friends with, or even had sexual

relations with, German women and girls. Hitler replied, as Himmler

noted in a minute, ‘every POW who has relations with a German girl or

a German woman should be shot’, and the German woman should be

publicly denounced by ‘having her hair shorn and being sent to a concen-

tration camp’.

On 8 January Heydrich informed the Gestapo ofﬁces that

the POWs concerned would be transferred by the Wehrmacht’s POW

department to the Gestapo.

(In December, at Himmler’s request, Best

had already ordered all Poles who left their place of work without permis-

sion to be imprisoned in a concentration camp).

On 29 February 1940 Himmler expressed his views on the treatment of

Polish agricultural workers, who were being brought into the Reich in

ever-increasing numbers, to a group of senior party functionaries. It was

impossible to ‘screen’ a million Poles within a few weeks and to allow only

‘racially valuable and decent people’ into the Reich. Instead, the Poles were

being ‘brought in en bloc and treated as Poles en bloc’. They would be

given a badge, and as a matter of principle ‘they would not be allowed to

form relationships with Germans [ . . . ] If a Pole has sex [ . . . ] with a German

woman the man will be hanged and it will be done in front of his camp.

Then the others won’t do it.’ Moreover, Himmler reassured his audience

that they were making sure ‘that there are a sufﬁcient number of Polish

women and girls coming over as well so that there can be no question of

there being any need’. The German women who had forbidden relations

with Poles, Himmler added, would be ‘mercilessly taken to court’

and, if there was insufﬁcient evidence to secure a conviction, ‘sent to a

concentration camp’. There was ‘no point’, the Reichsfu

hrer concluded, in

repression in the reich 475

‘theorizing’ about this. It would be ‘better if we didn’t have them—we all

know that—but we need them’.

Barely two weeks later, on 8 March 1940, the question of how Polish

civilian workers living in the Reich were to be treated was ﬁnally and

comprehensively dealt with by the so-called ‘Polish decrees’, a collection

of ten documents in total.

In this connection Himmler informed Gestapo

ofﬁces through a telex from the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce that they

should be responsible for punishing insubordinate behaviour by Poles—

habitually negligent work, strikes, leaving the workplace without permis-

sion, acts of sabotage, and so on—on their own initiative through consign-

ment to a work re-education camp or a concentration camp, and, in

particularly serious cases, through ‘special treatment’—in other words,

execution. In the case of sexual intercourse between Polish workers and

Germans, the Pole should be shot without waiting for the sentence of a

court; the German partner, whether male or female, should be sent to a

concentration camp.

If the case did go to court and there was no guilty

verdict, imprisonment in a concentration camp should nevertheless be

imposed. In a decree of May 1940, reﬂecting Hitler’s instruction of

September 1939, Himmler added that, ‘if the local women and girls wish

publicly to denounce the woman concerned or to cut off her hair before

she is transferred to a concentration camp the police should not intervene

to prevent it.’

In July the application of the March decrees was extended to cover

POWs who had been released.

Large numbers of executions of Polish

POWs for having sexual relations with German women began after the

victory over France in June 1940. However, after July 1941 Himmler

ordered the RSHA to examine every single case, in order to establish

through ‘a racial assessment’ whether the Polish man concerned was capable

of being ‘Germanized’. If this was the case he was sent to a KZ for a

relatively short time. If the racial assessment was negative he was executed.

The press reported the incidents with the standard formula: ‘hanged [ . . . ]

on the orders of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Chief of the German Police for

illicit sexual relations.’

It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that at the start of the war the

Gestapo had begun to pursue all actual or potential ‘enemies’ of the regime

with the same degree of harshness. The number of cases brought against

left-wingers and critical or opposition members of religious denominations

476 repression in the reich

appears even to have reduced.

The historian Eric Johnson has shown that,

as in the pre-war period, more than 40 per cent of the preliminary inves-

tigations were directed against ‘ordinary Germans’,

who in wartime too

were treated relatively mildly and got away with a warning or a ﬁne.

By contrast, the surveillance and persecution of the Jews was

drastically increased after the outbreak of war. This also had organizational

repercussions. Department IV D4, established in the RSHA at the beginning

of 1940 under Eichmann, and shortly afterwards renamed IV B4 ( Jewish

affairs, evacuation affairs), focused on the ‘Jewish question’.

Among other

things, the section controlled the Reich Association of Jews, created in July

1939, to which all the Jewish communities that still existed and all remaining

Jewish associations, organizations, foundations, and so on were subordinated.

During the ﬁrst months after the outbreak of war the exclusion of Jews

from German society was completed.

Joseph Walk’s collection of anti-

Jewish legislation reveals that between the November pogrom of 1938 and

the outbreak of war 229, and between 1 September 1939 and the start of

the deportations in October 1941 exactly 253 anti-Jewish measures were

enacted, often by Himmler or the security police. On 10 September 1939

Himmler issued an unpublished edict imposing a 8 p.m. curfew for Jews.

On 12 September 1939 the security police limited the Jews to certain

shops,

and on 23 September the Gestapa ordered the ‘immediate’ conﬁs-

cation of all radios in the possession of Jews throughout the Reich.

Further measures imposed by other authorities included the removal of

telephones,

discriminatory treatment in relation to air-raid precautions,

as well as discrimination in the allocation of rationed goods, which was

ensured by marking Jews’ ration-books with a J.

Moreover, the whole of

the Jewish population capable of work was obliged to perform compulsory

labour,

and more and more Jews had to vacate their ﬂats and move into

speciﬁed ‘Jew houses’ ( Judenha

user).

From May 1941 onwards Gestapo

ofﬁces began to set up special ‘Jew camps’ ( Judenlager), particularly near

large cities.

The SD reported that, in the ﬁrst quarter of 1940, 10,312 Jews had

emigrated from Germany.

On 24 April 1940 the Reich Security Main

Ofﬁce instructed Gestapo ofﬁces that they must ‘continue to press ahead

with Jewish emigration from the Reich, and to an even greater extent

during the war’.

repression in the reich 477

The Kripo

During the war the criminal police (Kripo) had to cede a large part

of its personnel to agencies in the occupied territories as well as to

Einsatzkommandos, the Gestapo, and to the Wehrmacht’s Secret Field

Police. The gaps were inadequately ﬁlled by the reactivation of pensioned

ofﬁcers as well as through the appointment of outsiders.

At the same time, the Kripo acquired numerous new responsibilities. It

was expected to impose greater control and discipline on young people,

who were subject to a variety of bans to prevent them from going astray;

also had to pursue the so-called war-economy offences, in other words,

breaches of the numerous rationing regulations such as slaughtering animals

without a permit, participating in the black market, or distributing forged

ration books.

During the later war years it also had to exercise control over

the millions of foreigners living in Germany, as well as deal with some of the

consequences of Allied bombing.

The criminal police responded to these new demands above all in two

ways: on the one hand, they no longer pursued so-called petty offences,

which among other things resulted in the statistics for certain offences such

as fraud showing a decline.

On the other hand, they gradually extended

the ‘preventive combating of crime’ until it became a policy of systematic

mass murder as the conditions in concentration camps were made consid-

erably harsher.

To begin with, the Kripo imposed preventive police detention on more

and more sections of the population. After the outbreak of war all those

‘unworthy of military service’ (that is to say, those who were excluded from

military service because of signiﬁcant previous convictions), women who

were suspected of working as prostitutes, as well as so-called criminal

psychopaths were consigned to concentration camps.

On 18 October

Himmler ordered that ‘work-shy’ people with previous convictions who

were arrested during police raids should no longer be reported to labour

exchanges but immediately transferred to concentration camps.

During

the ﬁrst weeks following the outbreak of war Himmler also had numerous

members of the socialist labour movement sent to concentration camps, as

well as 2,000 people of Polish origin.

Moreover, the Kripo rearrested

those Jews who had been taken into protective custody in November 1938

478 repression in the reich

and had then been released in return for their promise to emigrate, but who

had remained in the country.

Furthermore, the Reich Criminal Police

Ofﬁce ordered that all people who, on account of ‘mental instability’, were

suspected of spreading discontent among the population should be taken

into preventive police custody.

In addition, the persecution of clergy was

increased. Numerous new legal regulations which were issued immediately

after the outbreak of war, for example, the ban on listening to foreign

broadcasts, the Decree against National Pests, or the War Economy Decree,

provided the justiﬁcation for imposing preventive custody.

As far as crime-prevention was concerned, between the summer of 1940

and the autumn of 1941—that is, during the phase of Blitzkrieg victories—

the Kripo appears to have already been preparing for the post-war period.

The preventive measures were now extended to the annexed territories

(the Protectorate, western Poland, Alsace and Lorraine) and within the

Reich were increasingly geared to the priorities of population policy.

Homosexuals, sex offenders, and people who cohabited in order to avoid

the regulations of the Marriage Health Law all suffered ever-increasing

persecution.

Above all, as previously indicated, conditions for those

imprisoned in concentration camps became much harsher.

Concentration camps (KZ) and the establishment

of the SS’s business empire

Himmler was determined to respond to the increase in the number of

prisoners during the war by expanding the KZ system and to prevent any

camps being established outside the system he had created. During the

winter of 1939 –40 he had to intervene with several Higher SS and Police

Leaders on these grounds. In December 1939 he reprimanded Richard

Hildebrandt, the HSSPF responsible for the new Gau of Danzig–West

Prussia, for establishing his own camp in Stutthof. Hildebrandt was

intending to retain the Wachsturmbann Eimann, a formation created

from the Danzig SS, after the end of the war as an autonomous unit,

among other things to act as guards for ‘his KZ’. Himmler complained

that by setting up such an autonomous force Hildebrandt was helping to

bring about ‘the end of the SS as a uniﬁed organization’. He told him, in no

repression in the reich 479