Gestapo (7 page)

It is clear, however, from the illustrations already given, that there can be no sorting out of those problems. We are dealing with the struggle for power between rival gangs, and there is nothing more tedious and repetitive. There are no records left to speak of, and if records exist in full they would not be worth losing time over. It is enough to establish the nature of the soil which nurtured the Gestapo, and from which it sprang. And it is only by appreciating the utter demoralization of the German police force, a regular body which should have had a proud tradition, but which had not, that we can understand how that arch-gangster and master of iniquity, Reinhard Heydrich, the type of adventurer without a shadow, was able to seize the whole apparatus after barely a year of quiet application to the task, with such effortless ease.

The members of the regular German police were civil servants, reflecting the moral condition of their country as a whole no less clearly than civil servants everywhere. Diels was given his chance because of the general demoralization. He failed; but after the war he came back, and for some time held office in the Ministry of the Interior of the Bonn Government.

It is time to take a wider view, to look beyond the building in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, and to see the burgeoning Gestapo in relation to the administrative pattern as a whole.

If the reader finds himself muddled by the strange over-lappings and divisions of authority and executive power, he may be assured that he is in good company: the Germans themselves were also muddled. Even at Nuremberg, with its remarkable gathering of forensic talent, the court never succeeded in unraveling the tangle and laying bare the outlines of the hierarchy—for the very good reason
that no rigid outline ever existed. In the light of accumulated knowledge we can get a clearer picture than was possible at Nuremberg; but it will only be to find that behind the apparently iron front of Teutonic organization there was a sort of willed chaos.

It will be for each reader to decide for himself to what extent the confusion was deliberate and calculated, to what extent it was spontaneous and involuntary. Be that as it may, the Germans have brought to a high pitch the art of evading responsibility by losing all sense of it in total confusion; and it comes to much the same thing in the end whether the fostering of such confusion is due to calculated cunning or a more generalized intellectual dishonesty. The general impression created is of a system knocked together in an
ad hoc
manner by the members of a ruling caste intent on reinsuring themselves, never content to commit themselves finally to a single course, but forever contriving to hedge and lay off.

Confusion first arose from the dualism of the German police as such, and was magnified by the equivocal role of Himmler.

Strictly speaking, until the Nazis completed their centralizing action, there was no German police. Germany was a Federal Republic, and the various States, or
Laender
, as well as a number of important municipalities, ran their own police forces. There was indeed a Reichs Ministry of the Interior (R.M.d.I.), but this had little effective power and was a shadow compared with the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Prussia, in theory, was one
Land
among others; but in fact it controlled two-thirds of Germany and dominated the whole. The capital of Prussia was also the capital of the Reich. Only one other
Land
, Bavaria, was ever strong enough to assert its own independence to any effect.

When Hitler became Chancellor, he knew very well that with Goering in control of the Prussian State Administration and the Prussian Police he would soon be able to do what he liked with Germany. Von Papen, when he agreed to serve as Vice-Chancellor, was also aware of the importance of Prussia and reserved to himself the office of Minister President, with Goering at the Ministry of the Interior as technically his subordinate: he would be able,
he thought, by this means, to curb Goering's activities, and thus Hitler's. What he failed to see, however, was that Goering, with the apparatus of Prussian State power under his hand, would be serving the leader of the Nazis, who also happened to be Chancellor of the Reich, not the Minister President of Prussia, his constitutional superior. So von Papen was by-passed by his own police, and through that same force Hitler achieved more or less absolute control over Prussia as his first step to dictatorship over Germany as a whole.

Germany, by the standards of other Western countries, had long been over-policed. In Prussia the plainclothes branches had consisted of the Criminal Police (Kripo), a sort of C.I.D. (headed by Artur Nebe, the secret Nazi), and the Political Police, or Stapo, a sort of Special Branch (taken over by Diels and turned into the Gestapo). The uniformed police consisted of the Order Police, or Orpo, who lived in barracks in the large cities and were used as mobile squads for use in case of rioting and strikes; the Protective Police, or Schupo, the equivalent of the ordinary urban constabulary; the Gendarmerie, who acted as a constabulary for rural areas; and certain specialized forces—the Fire Police, who ran the fire brigades, and the Railway and Water Police. All these bodies, some of which were concerned with duties carried out in other countries by voluntary associations or local councils, were run for the Prussian Minister of the Interior by a supreme head, the Chief of Police in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, and, in his hands, constituted a formidable body.

We have already encountered S.S. Lieutenant General Kurt Daluege, and we shall encounter him again. We have spoken of him as Himmler's personal agent in Berlin. But here is another source of confusion. He was technically responsible to Himmler only as the leader of the Berlin S.S. His official position was Chief of the Prussian Police, under Goering; and Himmler, as Chief of the Bavarian Police, had no jurisdiction over him in this capacity. His first task in Berlin was to carry on Goering's purge of doubtful elements of the police, replacing them with old Party men and members of the S.A. and the S.S. (which was then still a part of the S.A.). Until Goering put the Gestapo under Himmler in April, 1934, Daluege was
technically the superior officer of Rudolf Diels, a fact which makes the scene in his office when Gisevius and Nebe discussed the feasibility of throwing Diels out of the window, a project suggested by Daluege's own lieutenant, even more extravagant than may at first sight have appeared.

Daluege's second task, however, was to assist Himmler and Heydrich to realize their aspiration of getting control of the Prussian Police. And in this task he worked against Goering. The unseating of Diels was part of the general plan; and the incident of Captain Packebusch was an attempt in this direction. It was not until April of the following year that Diels was finally got rid of on the pretext that he had been plotting against Goering, and Himmler was formally installed in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse as Deputy Chief of the Prussian Gestapo, Goering still retaining for reasons of prestige, as well as one other reason which we shall come to later, the nominal office of Chief of the Prussian Gestapo. By that time the opposition to the Nazi advance had been crushed and trampled to death, in the streets, in the rigged law-courts, in the bunkers of the S.A. and the torture barracks of the S.S., in the concentration camps and in the cellars of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse under Rudolf Diels. The new Deputy Chief of the Gestapo was able to concentrate on smashing the radical wing of the Party itself, led by Ernst Roehm at the head of the S.A.

This brings us to a further source of confusion: the structure of the S.S. and its relationship to the State administration. This confusion, as we have seen, existed from the first day of the Nazi revolution. January 30th, 1933. The Gestapo itself developed and ramified steadily in an unpredictable way for the next three years. It did not, however, receive an official stamp and sanction—so that, one might say, judicial and administrative confusion became a basic plank of State policy—until 1936 when Himmler, already Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. and Chief of Political Police throughout Germany, was formally inducted as Chief of German Police. Only then was the oppressive apparatus of the State and of the Party brought under one hand—thus providing a perpetual source of alibis for all who served under Himmler in any capacity
whatsoever, and making the letters of his style the most terrible initials in the history of Europe: RfSSu.Ch.d.d. Pol.im.R.M.d.I.

In 1933 he still had a long journey before him.

During that first year of the Nazi regime Hitler, who had started carefully, with only a solitary Nazi in the cabinet (this was the colorless Frick, at the Reichs Ministry of the Interior), had been consolidating his grip on the country with resounding success. By the time Himmler and Heydrich were ready to come from Munich to Berlin the stage was set for totalitarian action in the grand manner.

The first enemy had been the Communist Party, with its six million voters, many of whom by the time the year was out had joined the Nazis. In his diary on January 31st, the day after Hitler became Chancellor, Goebbels had written:

“In a conference with the Fuehrer we arranged meassures for combating the Red terror. For the present we shall abstain from direct action. First the Bolshevik attempt at a revolution must burst into flame. At the given moment we shall strike.”

And so it was—except that what burst into flame was the Reichstag, and it was not fired by the Communists.

On February 24th the Berlin Police raided the Karl Liebknecht House, the Communist headquarters. A communiqué was issued immediately afterwards which said that complete plans for the Bolshevik revolution had been discovered. These documents were never published.

On February 27th the Reichstag burst into flames and Hitler struck. Of all the incidents of the Nazi revolution this is the most familiar and the least rewarding of study. There is no need to recapitulate the details, and it is fairly certain that the Gestapo as such, under Diels, was not directly involved. The fire was supervised by Goering and Goebbels working through the S.A. It is established that Karl Ernst, the Chief of the Berlin S.A., taking a small
group of his followers, got into the empty Reichstag on the evening of the 27th by means of an underground passage which ran from the Palace of the President of the Reichstag (i.e., Goering) to the Reichstag building itself. There they sprayed a special preparation used in the past by Berlin hooligans (it bursts into flames after some exposure to the air) over carpets, curtains, and upholstery.

When this task was finished, and as they left the building by the way they had come, the wretched young Dutch Communist, degenerate and half insane, who had been chosen by the S.A. as their tool because of his known propensity for setting fire to things, got into the building through a window and started his own incendiarism in an amateurish way. To this day nobody knows what methods the S.A. used to persuade van der Lubbe to play his part at the given moment. But play it he did. It would have been better for Hitler and Goering if he had failed. The Reichstag would have gone up in flames just the same. The Communists could have been accused and liquidated without the farcical and damaging superfluity of the trial which turned Dimitrov and Torgler into martyrs.

It was the sort of clumsiness that was later to distinguish the work of Heydrich—notably in the assassination of Dr. Dollfuss in the Ballhausplatz in Vienna. But it was not the work of Heydrich, who was in Munich. Nor was it the work of Diels, though he had a great deal to do with the arrests that followed. It was the work of the higher Nazi leadership, using their trusted S.A. And, indeed, the exclusion of the Gestapo from this action is a fine example of the sort of madness that existed in those days.

Diels must have known all about it afterwards. In his book he protests too much, and his argument against the proper view that Goering and Goebbels were responsible is almost inconceivably lame. It is possible in his protestations to discover a certain pique at his exclusion from the deliberations preceding this great drama: for one thing Diels can never resist, and that is magnifying his own importance, even if, by doing so, he has to show himself a bigger rascal than he cares to seem to be. Gisevius, of course, has his story—prolix and circumstantial down to the last detail—too circumstantial to be true. But in one particular he carries conviction—on broad lines if not in
detail. And that is in his description of the liquidation by Diels and the Gestapo of certain S.A. participants in the Reichstag plot who had afterwards talked too much. That is what the Gestapo were for.

And it was the Gestapo which profited most from the fire itself. Next day, on February 28th, came the decree for “The Protection of the People and the State,” which Hitler induced President Hindenburg to sign. Described as “a defensive measure against Communist acts of violence,” it made an end of personal liberty as it had been guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution:

“Thus restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the Press; on the rights of assembly and association; violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; warrants for house searches; orders for confiscation as well as restrictions on property, are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”

The Police, in a word, were now given a free hand. But still Hitler was not dictator, and the Nazi Party was still a minority Party in a coalition government. The Reichstag Fire and the President's decree opened the last week of the election campaign which, on March 5th, was to give Hitler his majority. But in spite of the terrorism; the torchlight processions of marching brownshirts; the frenzied speeches (it was on March 3rd that Goering made his speech at Frankfurt in which he declared, “Here I don't have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate; nothing more”); individual acts of terror against Communists, Left Wing journalists, Trade Unionists, and opposition leaders of every kind; the shameless inactivity of the Police, who stood by and watched the S.A. beat their enemies to death and break into offices and shops—in spite of all this the Nazis won less than half the votes, while the Communists still got nearly five million to the Nazis' seventeen million. But it was enough for Hitler, and the subsequent proscription of the Communist Party gave him an absolute majority in the Reichstag.