Gestapo (9 page)

“Through the evil fertility of their minds the stories current in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany were built up into a nightmare of horrible appearance. It was no longer a meeting together of disgruntled persons, it was a plot, a conspiracy to murder, to be met and fought with its own weapons. Plans were laid for a drastic purge of the Party, which should include within its scope all enemies of the régime, both past and present, to the Right and to the Left. Lists of those to be ‘liquidated' were prepared and a certain bargaining went on whereby the friends of one were to be removed from the list of the other in return for reciprocal treatment. The date was fixed for mid-June, and all that was lacking was the Fuehrer's final consent for action.”

Still Hitler persisted in his strange reluctance to murder his oldest friend, and June 15th passed with Roehm still alive. But there was in being a strong movement of fate,
which could not be arrested. Everything conspired to favor the conspirators (Goering and Himmler were the conspirators, not Roehm) and to overcome Hitler's absurd scruples. Thus, on June 15th itself, Hitler met Mussolini, still dazzling, still patronizing, in Venice, and received some valuable advice as from an old dictator to a young one: Roehm, Heines, and others, the Duce had heard on good authority (the authority was the German Ambassador, von Hassell, who was later to be hanged after the failure of the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler's life), were men of loose morals and extremist tendencies who were getting the Party into disrepute: it would be a wise thing to remove them before they did more harm. Hitler still hesitated.

And then, only two days later, while the Nazi chieftains were assembled in the provincial city of Gera to hear Hitler's report on the Mussolini meeting, came the dramatic intervention of von Papen. It might have been engineered by Himmler, but it was not: it was the last, brave attempt of a vain, unstable, too-clever-by-half patriot, who had seen himself outwitted at every turn in the very battle of wits which he had backed himself to win, to break the back of the Nazi revolution. At the University of Marburg he made a great and gallant speech. It was great because it had been written by Edgar Jung, a blazing spirit of the Catholic Action, who, with his friends, had captured von Papen to express their own ideas. It was gallant because even von Papen with his remarkable blend of crassness and naïveté must have realized that he was exposing himself to danger of the most deadly kind. It was the last free and defiant utterance to be heard in Germany until after the death of Hitler, and it was fittingly cast in terms of extreme dignity and distinction. It attacked Goebbels, Roehm's only powerful supporter, without mentioning him by name; and it called upon the German people to resist a new wave of the Nazi revolution, which was then about to engulf them.

To the Nazi leaders it meant that they had to choose between the President and the Reichswehr, who stood behind von Papen, on the one hand, and the radical wing of their own movement on the other. It was the decisive moment. Hitler at last had to act. The coalition was disintegrating under the Fuehrer's eyes; for von Papen, von Neurath, and
others refused to put up with the calumnies now spouted against the Right by Goebbels, and sent in their resignations. The Army and the President stood by them, and Hitler had to give way. Goering and Himmler were called into action, and the conspiracy they had been fabricating was improved and extended. So were the lists of those to be done away with. Von Papen had done his bit in assuring the triumph of Himmler, with Heydrich behind him.

The plot, Goering's and Himmler's plot, long perfected, now ceased to be the private scheme of two conspirators: it became, like the Reichstag Fire plot, part of the policy of State. It was taken over by Hitler, and the Army itself prepared the way for its execution. On June 25th the Reichswehr all over the country was placed in a state of alert by its Commander-in-Chief, von Fritsch; leave was canceled and troops were confined to barracks. Germany was in effect handed over to Himmler, while the Army kept indoors. The S.S. was secretly mobilized and ordered to stand by for immediate action on June 28th. On that very day Roehm was formally expelled from the German Officers' League: he could now be arrested and charged with high treason without affecting the honor of the Reichswehr. It is likely that this is what the generals expected would happen; but the conspirators, who now included Hitler, had other views. Roehm was to be murdered; with him, his chief supporters; with them, anybody else Hitler, Goering, and Himmler between them, to say nothing of Heydrich, wanted out of the way.

The operation started soon after dark on Friday, June 29th. Hitler flew to Munich and arrived before dawn, leaving Goering and Himmler to look after Berlin. Hitler himself confronted the local S.A. leaders, who were under arrest, raved at them, and tore off their insignia with his own hands. Roehm and Heines were dragged out of bed in the Hanselbauer Hotel at Wiessee, a resort quite close to Munich. In his broadcast two days later, which sickened the world, Goebbels described the shooting of these two men, of whom, until a few days before, he had been the impasioned champion. The rest of the S.A. in Munich were rounded up and shot by an execution squad supplied by Hitler's S.S. bodyguard—the S.S.
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
commanded by Himmler's crony, Sepp Dietrich.

In Berlin their colleagues were taken to the Lichterfelde Barracks and shot there. It was in Berlin, too, that General von Schleicher and his wife were shot down and left lying in their own blood on their drawing-room floor. Von Papen was arrested, and would have been shot on Goering's orders but for Hindenburg's special protection. Two of his adjutants were shot dead at their desks, while the man who had written the famous Marburg speech for von Papen, Edgar Jung, was killed on the run. Karl Ernst, the Berlin S.A. leader, was out of town.

The S.A. was supposed to be actively conspiring against Hitler, but Roehm and Heines were on holiday near Munich, and Ernst was at Bremen about to embark on a pleasure cruise. The Gestapo were sent after him and brought him back to Berlin, where he was shot almost at once in the Lichterfelde Barracks, still believing that he was the victim of a
Putsch
by Goering against Hitler and Roehm. Gregor Strasser, Himmler's old chief, was declared to have committed suicide. But in fact he was shot in the Gestapo building on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Gisevius, who had been hanging about the place all day, trying to piece together what was going on, said:

“Strasser had been taken to the Gestapo prison at about noon. By that time some hundred arrested S.A. leaders were crowded together in one big room. These men had no idea why they had been arrested, nor did they know about the shootings that were going on in Munich and at Lichterfelde in Berlin. They were therefore inclined to look at the situation in its most humorous light, a mood which is common when people are arrested
en masse
. They cheered Strasser when he was brought in as a new comrade in misery.

“Some hours passed and there was a great deal of coming and going. Then an S.S. man came to the door and called out Strasser. The man who had formerly been next in importance to Adolf Hitler was to be moved to an individual cell. No one thought anything of it as Strasser walked slowly out of the room. But scarcely a minute later they heard the crack of a pistol.

“The S.S. man had shot the unsuspecting Strasser from behind and hit his main artery. A great stream of blood had spurted against the wall of the tiny cell. Apparently
Strasser did not die at once. A prisoner in the adjoining cell heard him thrashing about on the cot for nearly an hour. No one paid any attention to him. At last the prisoner heard loud footsteps in the corridor and orders being shouted. The guards clicked their heels, and the prisoner recognized Heydrich's voice saying: ‘Isn't he dead yet? Let the swine bleed to death.'

“The bloodstains on the wall of the cell remained for weeks. It was the pride of the S.S. squadron, a kind of museum piece. These cutthroats showed it to all the terrified inmates and boasted that it was the blood of a famous man, Gregor Strasser. It was only after he had received numerous complaints that Heydrich ordered the bloodstains to be cleaned.”

The building on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse was finally shaking down into its true character. Himmler was not there most of the time: he was supervising the executions in the Lichterfelde Barracks, familiarizing himself with the sort of work he required his subordinates to do and lending them moral support. On the Sunday evening, while the shooting was still going on, Hitler gave one of his special tea-parties in the garden of the Chancellery. It was to become a familiar gesture after a particularly gruelling time. (He was to give another, one of his last, ten years later, while the conspirators of July 20th were being shot.) It was a sign of his remarkable resilience. For only the evening before he had arrived from Munich at the Tempelhof Airport in no condition at all for tea-parties. Gisevius was at the airport with his police cronies, Daluege and Nebe, to welcome him:

“The plane from Munich was announced. In a moment we saw it looming swiftly larger against the background of a blood-red sky, a piece of theatricality that no one had staged. The plane roared down to a landing and rolled toward us. Commands rang out. A guard of honor presented arms. Goering, Himmler, Koerner, Frick, Daluege, and some twenty police officers went up to the plane. Then the door opened and Adolf Hitler was the first to step out.…

“A brown shirt, black bow tie, dark brown leather jacket, high black army boots—all dark tones. He wore no hat; his face was pale, unshaven, sleepless, at once
gaunt and puffed. Under the forelock pasted against his forehead his eyes stared dully. Nevertheless, he did not impress me as wretched, nor did he awaken sympathy, as his appearance might well have done. It was clear that the murders of his friends had cost him no effort at all. He had felt nothing; he had merely acted out of his rage.

“First Hitler silently shook hands with everyone within reach. Nebe and I, who had taken the precaution of standing some distance away, heard amid the silence the repeated monotonous sound of clicking heels.…

“On his way to the fleet of cars, which stood several hundred yards away, Hitler stopped to converse with Goering and Himmler. Apparently he could not wait a few minutes until he reached the Chancellery. He listened attentively as the two made their report, though he must have been in constant telephone communication with them all day.

“From one of his pockets Himmler drew a long, tattered list. Hitler read it through, while Goering and Himmler whispered incessantly into his ear. We could see Hitler's finger moving slowly down the sheet of paper. Now and then it paused for a moment at one of the names. At such times the two conspirators whispered even more excitedly. Suddenly Hitler tossed his head. There was so much violent emotion, so much anger in the gesture, that everybody noticed it. Nebe and I cast significant glances at one another. Undoubtedly, we thought, they were now informing him of Strasser's ‘suicide.'

“Finally they moved on, Hitler in the lead, followed by Goering and Himmler. Hitler was still walking with the same sluggish tread. By contrast, the two blood-drenched scoundrels at his side seemed all the more lively. Both Goering and Himmler, for all the bulkiness of the one and the drabness of the other, seemed cut out of the same cloth today. Both manifested the same self-importance, loquacity, officiousness, and the same sense of guilt. Without a sound, the rest of the procession followed at a discreet distance. Everybody behaved with abashed deference, as if he had been permitted to touch the hem of world history or to carry the blood-streaked
train that dragged behind the unholy triumvirate.”

The S.A. was finished. Roehm was succeeded by colorless von Lutze, and the brownshirts were never to play a major role again. The Army had triumphed. That is to say, it had kept proudly and virtuously aloof while Goering and Himmler had employed the methods of Chicago gangsters to break their most dangerous rivals. The generals were quite oblivious of the fact that by allowing Himmler, with his blackshirts and his Gestapo, to break the power of the S.A. they had put them in a position to dominate utterly not only the despised civilians but also the Army itself. For the generals, the 30th of June was the start of their melancholy progression to the dock at Nuremberg.

There was nothing now that could hold back Himmler and Heydrich except the will of the Fuehrer: and Hitler was well satisfied with them both. He had got Germany where he wanted her. He was comparatively uninterested in domestic politics. His concern was to turn the nation into a first-class fighting power. “For us the revolution is no permanent condition.” he declared in his speech defending the massacre of June 30th. And indeed it was not. Already, a year earlier, he had said, “Many more revolutions have been successful at the outset than have, after their initial success, been checked and brought to a standstill at the right moment.” The right moment, a little belatedly, had been caught. The revolutionary flame was dead. Hitler was free to build up the might of Germany in collaboration with the generals, the manufacturers, the financiers.

There was to be no political life in the country. All parties were banned, and he. Hitler, proposed to govern by decree. The administration was provided by the purged offices of local government. The discipline and the drive would be provided by a police terror. Himmler and Heydrich had shown that they knew how to provide that, and they could be safely left to carry on. Goering, with his own position secured by the murder of Roehm and the final
abasement of Goebbels, could from now on afford to loosen his grip on the police.

But Himmler and Heydrich went very quietly. They settled down to consolidate what they had and to extend the limits of their power. The Gestapo and the S.D. provided the brain; the general S.S., the physical threat; the S.S. Death's-head formations (the concentration camp guards), the ultimate terror. It was the task of the Gestapo and the S.D. to penetrate into every aspect of public and private life secretly, and publicly to create a legend of terror designed to make them appear even more omniscient and ubiquitous than in fact they were. Their power soon outran their official mandate. Nearly two years were to pass before the Gestapo was legalized as such and Himmler became officially what he already was in fact, the Chief of the unified German Police. It was not until 1939, on the eve of the war, that the instrument of terror achieved its final shape.