Gestapo (26 page)

But in this chaos of renewed vendetta and intrigue we find many of the old familiar faces. Mueller is still there, with his flickering eyes, still more or less efficiently directing the terror machine of the New Order, which has already lost a great deal of land. Eichmann is still there, dauntless to the end, purposefully touring Europe in the intervals of issuing his appalling imperatives from Berlin, and scooping up into Auschwitz, preparing for its last high summer, the Jews that were left. 1944 was to be an important year for him. His great achievement was the delivery of Hungarian Jewry, who moved into the gas chambers of S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Hoess while the Reich began to crumble at the edges. At the same time, in Budapest, instead of slinking about anonymously with his artificially low rank, “like a pest in a street full of men,” he felt bold enough to throw off his camouflage and display himself publicly as the man with the power of life and death over millions.

Hoess is still at Auschwitz, but will soon come to Berlin to work in the head office of the W.V.H.A. under Pohl. Ohlendorf is already back in Berlin, but no longer with the S.D.: he is now an instructed member of the Ministry of Economics. Daluege is still there. He has been there all
the time at the head of the Orpo; and if we have scarcely heard anything of him at all, it is partly because he was careful of what papers he kept (he left two behind with his signature on, mass deportation orders for Jews), and partly because eye-witnesses so often mixed up the Orpo with the Sipo. For we have seen the work of his men many times in the course of this narrative, without always quite knowing what we saw: officers and men of the special battalions of the Orpo who worked with the Security Police and the S.D. in their special actions, as at Slutzk.

Even our old friend Artur Nebe is still there, still head of the Kripo, and now a full General of the S.S. We pick him up again, curiously enough, in the matter of the Sagan shootings, in which the Kripo were deeply involved. One of his subordinates, Major Wielen, who gave evidence at Nuremberg before he was himself tried and sentenced, was in charge of the search, which extended over the whole of Germany and beyond. It was he who issued the order for the
Grossfahndung
, the emergency hue and cry, which completely shattered the quiet, everyday routine of the whole of the German Police. And when all the escaped prisoners had been recaptured, he was called to Berlin by Nebe himself:

“I gave him a short, concise report on the whole matter as it stood at that time. He then showed me a teleprint order signed by Dr. Kaltenbrunner, in which it was stated that on the express personal orders of the Fuehrer more than half the officers escaped from Sagan were to be shot after their recapture. The officer in charge of Department IV, Lieutenant General Mueller, had received corresponding orders and would give instructions to the State Police. Military headquarters had been informed.”

Wielen then went on to say:

“General Nebe himself appeared shocked at this order. He was very distressed. I was afterwards told that for nights on end he had not gone to bed but had passed the night on his office settee.”

That seems to bring us back to our beginning. One would have thought that after all he had seen Artur Nebe's capacity for being shocked would have been exhausted. In
1933, in the early days of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, we first met Artur Nebe, the secret Nazi, the disguised idealist, being shocked into speechlessness by the temporary triumph of Rudolf Diels, in those halcyon days of the Gestapo when they were not overworked and had only to kill in tens instead of in millions. And he goes on being shocked for the next eleven years: by the massacre of June 30th; by the news that Jews were being gassed in Poland. And here, nearly at the end, he is still as emotional as ever. He is shocked by the order to kill fifty R.A.F. prisoners-of-war even as he passes it on. And in the meantime he has commanded
Einsatzgruppe
B in Russia; and in his room there reposed the only existing copy of a film of Auschwitz in action ever to be found. Yet all the time, according to Gisevius and others, he was taking part in the conspiracy against Hitler, which ended on July 20th, 1944, with the savage killing of the more active-minded conspirators and the disappearance of Nebe—to his death at the hands of Kaltenbrunner's hangman, according to Gisevius, a martyr to the liberal cause.

In actual fact Nebe seems to have been an unscrupulous careerist with a twisted mind and no clear views on anything but his own advancement. It is true that he kept in close touch with the conspiratorial circles. He certainly had one motive—to reinsure himself, as he had reinsured himself when he became a secret Nazi before Hitler came to power. Probably he had another—while reinsuring himself, to keep an eye on the conspiracy so that he could choose his moment to expose it, if this seemed desirable and useful to his career. He was never at the heart of the plot; and the information he passed on to the devoted band of soldiers and civilians who were ready to risk their lives, and finally did risk them and lose them, was never of real importance. So it is fair to conclude that the failure of the attempt gave Nebe his last shock, from which he never recovered.

What are we to make of all this? We have not followed the activities of the Gestapo in detail. Its crimes fill volumes. We have not so much as touched on the conspiratorial activities of Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner and Mueller after the accession to power (for example, the fantastic story of the bogus attempt on Hitler's life in 1940 on the
anniversary of the Munich
Bierkeler Putsch
). The whole immense field of the foreign activities of the S.D., under Walter Schellenberg, has had to be ignored. But we have traced the founding and the growth of the Gestapo; and we have seen enough of the things it did, and of the individuals inside it, or closely connected with it, to have a fair idea of its performance.

And in the course of this examination it has become clear that the Gestapo did not function as a dark and sinister tyranny, compact and aloof, ruling first Germany, then most of Europe, alone, in secrecy, and unobserved; but, once absolute power had been achieved, merged itself inextricably with the general mood of Germany as a whole, so that in occupied Europe, especially in the East, it is hard to separate the cruelties of the Gestapo and the S.D. from the cruelties of the Wehrmacht, and quite impossible to separate them from the cruelties of Daluege's uniformed police and from the General S.S. and the Waffen S.S.

And we have seen how deeply all sorts of Germans were involved in activities which, according to the Nuremberg defense, were known only to a selected few. The Army had to supply and house the
Einsatzgruppen
and assist the Security Police and S.D. in sorting out prisoners-of-war for execution. The civil administration of the occupied countries, as well as of Germany, had to assist in many ways, and only sometimes protested, and then weakly. Area Commissioners in the East had to provide facilities for mass executions; Gauleiters and their subordinates in Germany itself had to assist in the fulfilment of the Bullet Decree. Transport officials in Germany and all over Europe had to provide Eichmann with his trains.

When Globocnik in Lublin sent in his report to Himmler announcing the winding up of
Aktion Reinhard
he had a great deal to say about the proceeds in cash and kind: rings, ladies' gold wristwatches, gentlemen's gold pocket watches, ladies' watches with brilliants, ladies' watches of platinum, spectacles, shaving equipment, oocket knives, alarm clocks, silver cigarette cases, clinical thermometers—all detailed to the last mark, and adding up to forty-three million, six hundred sixty-two thousand Reichsmark. There were one thousand nine hundred wagon loads of clothing, underclothes, rags, and bed-feathers, adding up to twenty-six
million Reichsmark. There were milllons of marks of currency of all kinds, so that by the end of December, 1943, the total loot amounted to one hundred seventy-eight million seven hundred forty-five thousand Reichsmark—from
Aktion Reinhard
alone.

“I want you to look at Page Sixteen of this report,” said the American Prosecution: “Other valuables: five gold revolving pencils; five hundred seventy-six gentlemen's wristwatches; thirteen thousand four hundred fifty-five gentlemen's pocket watches and miscellaneous ladies' jewelry; then the item twenty-two thousand three hundred twenty-four spectacles; and then, next but one to that, eleven thousand six hundred seventy-five rings; then all the precious little possessions of these people, necklaces, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses, each one itemized down to the last sordid Reichsmark.”

Some of these things were doled out directly to the troops and the civilian population. The great bulk—and not only from
Aktion Reinhard
, but from Auschwitz and elsewhere—found their way, via the Concentration Camp Administration, into the vaults of the Reichs Bank in Berlin, under the personal direction of Herr Funk. This remarkable transaction was not effected without many people knowing, wondering, and guessing. And there were the tens of thousands of German civilians who saw the prisoners from the concentration camps being taken to and from their work in the factories and quarries outside; and the deportees packed almost to death in their trains.

Sometimes, of course, there were protests. We have encountered one or two. We have Major Roesler, Commander of the 528th Infantry Regiment, putting in a report to the Commander of the 9th Military District in which he gives his own account of a mass execution which is almost identical with the account of the German engineer, Graebe, which we have quoted in full. He was deeply shocked by what he saw, and his report was forwarded to the chief of the army armament and equipment department in Berlin with a covering note:

“Subject: Atrocities perpetrated on the civilian population of the East.

“With regard to the news of mass executions in Russia
which we are receiving, I was at first convinced that they had been unduly exaggerated. I am forwarding herewith a report from Major Roesler which fully confirms these rumors.…

“If these things are done openly they will become known in the fatherland and give rise to criticism.

“Signed: Schirwindt.”

And we have the protest to Rosenberg of the Reichs Commissioner for Eastern Territories:

“It should be possible to avoid atrocities and bury those who have been liquidated. To lock men, women, and children into barns and set fire to them does not appear to be a suitable method of disposing of partisans, even if it is desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German cause, and damages our reputation severely.”

But even these protests were strictly limited in scope. Liquidation as such is not in question: it is simply a problem of method.

In considering how these things came to be, whether they reveal a particular wickedness of the German people, and whether circumstances could arise elsewhere in which other nations might find themselves behaving in this way, several lines of inquiry may be seen to open themselves.

In the first place it is inaccurate to say that only Germans were engaged in the horrors we have seen. Austrians, many of them with Slavonic blood, were deeply implicated. Hitler himself was an Austrian; so, to name only two, were Kaltenbrunner and Globocnik. Eichmann had been brought up as an Austrian. There were many others.

Furthermore, it is inaccurate to think purely in terms of Teutonism. The
Einsatzgruppen
recruited and trained elements from the occupied countries, above all the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians. At Slutzk the Lithuanian mercenaries outdid the German Police in their zeal, and were accounted extremely useful up to a point—the point being reached when they lost their first enthusiasm for killing and were then found to lack the steady training and tradition which enabled the Germans to go on killing even when they were bored.

When it came to the high-spirited slaughter of Jews the
native Ukrainians, employed at first with great hopes, became altogether too much for the Germans and had to be discouraged because they got out of hand. The Roumanians, too, showed a great aptitude for mass murder
and
conducted their own massacres at Odessa and elsewhere. In Western Europe certain officials, police and civil, of the Vichy Government showed the greatest ardor in assisting Oberg, Knochen, and Eichmann. Quisling could be harsher and more ruthless than the German Police Chiefs themselves.

We also know that in Spain in the thirties atrocities of extreme savagery were committed by both sides. We know about the Soviet deportations and the horrors of forced labor in the Soviet arctic camps and elsewhere, involving human degradation on a truly massive scale. We know that both Americans and British are still capable, as individuals, of atrocious behavior to those whom they consider to be their racial inferiors.

Thus we are clearly going about things the wrong way if we allow ourselves to start with the assumption that only Germans could behave in the manner recorded in these pages.

Otto Ohlendorf, the scholarly commander of
Einsatzgruppe
D, had thought long about this, and, according to his lights, deeply. In the last days of the Reich he emerged from the seclusion of the Ministry of Economics and went to Himmler, his old chief, and tried to persuade him to surrender to the Allies so that he might justify the ways of the S.S. He failed in this; but, at his own trial, he tried to remedy the error, ranging through the whole history of mankind to show that, on occasion, mass murder has been indulged in by most peoples for ends generally considered desirable, and bringing the matter up to date by insisting that posterity would be unable to perceive the difference between his mass-executions on the Russian Front and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But in that case posterity will be wrong. The dropping of atom bombs without specific warning may have been inexcusable; but the decision to do so was taken by harrassed men in the extremity of a life and death conflict. It aroused immediate feelings of revulsion. The mass murder of Jews and Russians was a deliberate policy made
possible by the war but had nothing to do with the winning of it. It was carried out systematically and in cold blood by men who knew what they were doing and watched their victims die.