Hitler's Hangman (22 page)

‘that all Heydrich’s subordinates feared him, yet all of them also shared a

certain admiring respect for him’.89

Heydrich consciously cultivated this image, and the combination of fear

and admiration that Best described was partly due to the fact that he

appeared to live out the high demands he placed upon his men. His work-

days were long: he went to his office at dawn and did not return home

until late at night, usually eating dinner at work. Despite his increasingly

busy schedule, he still managed to find the time and enthusiasm for daily

physical exercise and he expected his men to share his enthusiasm.90 Here,

too, he tried to live up to SS ideals. The physical appearance of an SS man

was seen as evidence of inner composure, masculinity and strength. The

public image of an SS officer, so Heydrich believed, depended on his

physical fitness, a perfectly maintained uniform, controlled behaviour and

bodily posture. Public drinking in uniform was discouraged, moderation

in smoking desired. Even during the war, Heydrich would insist on strict

adherence to schedules for physical exercise which he himself devised for

his employees. The Reich Security Main Office had its own sport facilities

and all of his men were expected to attend classes twice a week, with

female employees doing additional sessions on Saturdays between 8 and

10 a.m.91

Unlike Himmler, who alternated between fatherly reprimands and

praise in his attempt to educate his men, Heydrich’s leadership style was

based on instilling fear and setting an example of how to live life as an SS

man. He rarely gave an impression of joviality and friendly conviviality in

the company of others, hardly ever drank or smoked and never indulged

in expensive dinners. His self-imposed ascetism was part of the soldierly

self-image that he cultivated until his death. At work, he allocated tasks

to his immediate subordinates who were to carry out his orders efficiently

and creatively, thus encouraging radical initiatives from below. From very

early on, Heydrich promoted and lived an ideal of
Menschenführung
– the

SS term for leadership – with a radical emphasis on instinct, ideological

commitment and rule-despising activism that differed profoundly from

the leadership ideals of the traditional administration. Personal initiative

was rewarded and compromises considered acts of cowardice – an attitude

that was to have fatal consequences during the unleashing of SS

Einsatzgruppen
violence in the Second World War.92

Although the SD was stil a tiny organization with little resemblance to

its later incarnation as a sinister wartime instrument of terror, by 1934 it

had already begun to display characteristics of its later incarnation. Since

the active persecution of the opposition remained the task of the state, and

more specifical y of the political police, the SD focused its surveil ance and

B E C O M I N G H E Y D R I C H

75

espionage activity on those supposed enemy groups that were not, as yet,

the primary targets of Nazi suppression: Jews, Freemasons and the

Churches. At least in part driven by the desire to justify its existence, the

SD thus provided the material and ideological basis for future waves of

persecution.93 During the first few years of the Third Reich, Heydrich’s

SD also attracted a large number of men who differed remarkably from

the typical Nazi functionary. Heydrich surrounded himself with an inner

circle of men who were both significantly younger than most of the other

leading personalities in the civil service and substantial y better educated

than the average Nazi Party member. In the mid-1930s, the typical SD

leader was, like Heydrich himself, around thirty years old. Unlike Heydrich,

most of them had experienced their political awakening during the early

years of the Weimar Republic when they became active in far-right asso-

ciations and clubs. Defying the danger of disqualifying themselves from

jobs in the civil service, they tended to maintain contacts with il egal

right-wing groups during their university education. The peculiar self-

perception of most SD leaders was therefore based on firm ideological

commitment, an emphasis on activism and efficiency, and an elitist rejec-

tion of mass organizations such as the SA or indeed the Nazi Party itself.94

In selecting his closest subordinates, Heydrich placed greatest impor-

tance on ideological conviction, soldierly bearing and an athletic physical

appearance.95 His personal adjutant between 1938 and 1942, Dr Hans-

Achim Ploetz, was a prime example: born in 1911, Ploetz had earned his

PhD in literature and fulfilled every ideological and physical precondition

for the job. Tall, athletic, blond and blue-eyed, he was praised by Heydrich

as an ‘immaculate National Socialist’.96 The relative youthfulness and

learning of his SD recruits were an expression of Heydrich’s determina-

tion to create a new efficient, professional and ideologically reliable Nazi

elite, an elite by virtue of achievement, ability and discipline. This new elite

was groomed to fulfil crucial tasks and roles in the Third Reich, which

Heydrich was determined to consolidate and secure permanently. Much

later, during the Second World War, these men would become Heydrich’s

preferred personnel for service in the East.97

Power Struggle for Prussia

By the summer of 1934, Himmler and Heydrich had brought the political

police agencies in most of the German states under their control, but

Prussia, the largest and most politically important German state, remained

beyond their reach. Any attempt to seize control over the Prussian

police would have been perceived as a direct challenge to the powerful

Minister President of Prussia, Hermann Göring, who personally directed

76

HITLER’S HANGMAN

the Prussian Political Police, the Gestapo. Both Heydrich and Himmler

knew all too well that they were not in a position to win that contest.98

But neither Himmler nor Heydrich was easily deterred. In their pursuit of

control over the Gestapo, they benefited from the fact that the random

violence of the SA, which Göring had instated as an auxiliary police force

in February 1933, increasingly threatened to damage the authority of the

party and the state. This irritated not only the Nazis’ conservative coalition

partners but also large sections of the German population. Although

reluctant to concede any of his powers to Himmler, Göring began to

regard the SS as the only appropriate instrument with which to keep its

much larger rival, the SA, in check. He therefore instructed the political

police to use only SS men as auxiliary policemen and decided that new

positions in the Gestapo should be strictly reserved for SS men.99

In April 1934, Göring and Himmler met to discuss the future of the

Prussian Political Police. Himmler convinced Göring that he would

remain in overall control of the Gestapo and that the SS would never

threaten his authority. Assured of his overall control, Göring formally

appointed Himmler as acting director of the Gestapo. While Himmler

formally remained under Göring’s supervision, control over all the polit-

ical police formations in Germany now rested in the hands of the most

radical party formation, the SS. Despite Göring’s initial objections,

Heydrich rose in Himmler’s wake: on 22 April 1934, he moved back to

Berlin to assume his new position as acting chief of the Gestapo office

while also retaining his function as head of the SD.100

Immediately after taking control of the Gestapo, Heydrich transferred

trusted staff from the Bavarian Political Police, including Heinrich

Müller, Franz Josef Huber and Josef Meisinger, to the Gestapo headquar-

ters in Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, a former Arts and Crafts school in

the heart of Germany’s government district that was to become synony-

mous with the Nazi terror state.101 When Heydrich took over the Prussian

Gestapo in April 1934, he inherited with it a sizeable bureaucratic appa-

ratus encompassing some 700 officials and staff members in the Berlin

headquarters, as well as about 1,000 further staff in the Gestapo’s local

branches all over Prussia.102 Over the following three years, the number of

staff would rise to roughly 7,000 employees, most of them officers in the

field. Three-quarters of the employees of Nazi Germany’s political police

had already worked in different branches of the police during the Weimar

Republic; a further 5 per cent came from other state agencies. Only 20 per

cent were new recruits, mostly members or supporters of the Nazi Party.103

In addition the political police could draw on an army of paid and unpaid

informers, many of them former enemies of Nazism who bought their

freedom by spying on former comrades
,
as well as the so-called block

B E C O M I N G H E Y D R I C H

77

wardens, usually Nazi sympathizers and caretakers in apartment blocks.

No fewer than 200,000 block wardens existed by 1935, each of them

responsible for the political supervision of between forty and sixty house-

holds.104 As the American journalist Howard Smith, a foreign corre-

spondent in Nazi Germany, observed, mutual distrust quickly permeated

German society as a result, creating an omnipresent accusatory climate:

‘“
Ich zeige Dich an, junger Mann!
” – That’s the magic phrase these days: “I’ll

have you arrested, you imprudent young man,” that and “I have a friend

who’s high up in the Party and
he
will tell you a thing or two!” They’re like

children threatening to “call my Dad, who’s bigger than yours”.’105

The conventional image of a self-supervising German society is,

however, an exaggeration. Only a tiny fraction of the population of

the Third Reich voluntarily provided information to the Gestapo.

Denunciations of certain ‘crimes’ such as ‘race defilement’ (sexual relations

with Jews) or the telling of political jokes were much more common than

the denunciation of political enemies. In absolute figures, the cases of

denunciation were rare; for example, not only were there only between

three and fifty-one denunciations a year in the state of Lippe, where the

population was 176,000, but a high proportion of the denouncers were

members of the Nazi Party.106 Even in the capital of Nazi Germany, the

density of political supervision remained remarkably loose. The number of

Gestapo personnel never exceeded 800 officers and operatives. In a city

of 4.5 million inhabitants, this equated to no more than one agent for

5,600 Berliners.107

Yet although the Gestapo was never a huge organization it consciously

created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Heydrich actively contrib-

uted to this atmosphere by portraying the Gestapo in newspaper articles

and public speeches as an omnipresent organization rightly feared by the

enemies of the state while simultaneously suggesting that ‘honest citizens’

had nothing to fear. This perception did not reflect the actual strength of

the Gestapo but nonetheless successfully created a situation in which

citizens refrained from committing ‘crimes’ out of fear of its reach.108

Shortly after securing control of the Gestapo, Heydrich and Himmler

turned to the next obstacle that stood in the way of their growing ambi-

tions: the SA under the leadership of Ernst Röhm. This struggle was

particularly sensitive as Röhm was not only a close acquaintance of

Heydrich but also the godfather of his eldest son, Klaus, who was born on

17 June 1933. Heydrich, Himmler and Röhm had been allies, even

friends, in the first months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor,

forming a common front against conservatives and moderate Nazis. It was

the SS’s gradual acquisition of the state police apparatus that drove a

wedge between them. Once the SS leadership had taken control of all of

78

HITLER’S HANGMAN

the legitimate means of state repression, the SA with its illegal street

violence became an inconvenient competitor in the struggle for the

control of force in Nazi Germany. Heydrich viewed the SA’s lack of disci-

pline and its questionable loyalty to the Führer with growing concern:

while he had some personal sympathy for the anti-establishment radi-

calism of Röhm and his associates, he and Himmler quickly realized that

more power was to be gained by joining the growing anti-SA camp of

conservatives and senior military figures who rejected the SA’s ambition

to become the Third Reich’s revolutionary army that would ultimately

replace the old Reichswehr.

The Night of the Long Knives

Heydrich was wel aware that a tense mood prevailed in Germany in the