Masters of Death (16 page)

Hans Gisevius saw some of the Röhm Purge and survived to recall it. Gisevius was an articulate lawyer, involved throughout the war in plots against Hitler, who was maneuvering at that time to take over the Prussian state Gestapo. At Göring’s palace on Saturday afternoon, with Kurt Daluege (then the federal chief of police), Gisevius encountered the execution committee itself:

Through the door [into Göring’s study] we could see Göring, Himmler, Heydrich, and little Pilli Koerner, undersecretary to Göring in his capacity as minister-president. We could see them conferring, but naturally we could not hear what was being said. Occasionally, however, we could catch a muffled sound: “Away!” or “Aha!” or “Shoot him!” For the most part we heard nothing but raucous laughter. The whole crew of them seemed to be in the best humor.

. . . We suddenly heard loud shouting. A police major, his face flaming, rushed out of the room, and behind him came Göring’s hoarse, booming voice: “Shoot them . . . take a whole company . . . shoot them . . . shoot them at once!” The written word cannot reproduce the undisguised blood lust, fury, vicious vengefulness, and, at the same time, the fear, the pure funk, that the scene revealed.

By then Strasser, Himmler’s first patron and a figure of national prominence in the SA and the party, was already dead. Gisevius learned from an eyewitness how he died. “Strasser had been taken to the Gestapo prison around noon. By that time some hundred arrested SA leaders were crowded together in one big room.” Since they had not in fact been plotting a putsch, they had no idea why they had been arrested. Time passed. An SS man arrived and called Strasser out. It made sense, says Gisevius, that “the man who had formerly been next in importance to Adolf Hitler in the Nazi Party was to be moved to an individual cell.” The men gave way and Strasser was gone:

But scarcely a minute later they heard the crack of a pistol. The SS 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.”

At ten o’clock that night Hitler’s plane from Munich landed at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Gisevius was there as a spectator with his friend Arthur Nebe, the future commander of Einsatzgruppe B, who was then a Gestapo official. The sky was blood red when the plane came in, Gisevius remembered, “a piece of theatricality that no one had staged.” Commands, an honor guard presenting arms, and then Göring, Himmler, Daluege and a crowd of police officers approached the plane. Hitler emerged wearing a black bow tie, a brown shirt, a leather jacket, high boots. His face was puffy from lack of sleep and unshaven, but Gisevius says, “he did not impress me as wretched, nor did he awaken sympathy. . . . 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 his rage.”

Walking toward the waiting line of cars, Hitler stopped to talk to Göring and Himmler:

From one of his pockets Himmler took a long, tattered list. Hitler read it through, while Göring 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. . . . Suddenly Hitler tossed his head. There was so much violent emotion, so much anger in the gesture, that everyone 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 was still walking with the same sluggish tread. By contrast the two blood-drenched scoundrels at his side seemed all the more lively. Both Göring 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.

We may doubt the sense of guilt, but both, Himmler especially, must have been as nervous as two tattling schoolboys colluding with the principal, afraid his wrath might next fall on them. Both men would admit that entering the Führer’s presence always made them nauseous. As Göring put it, “Every time I face him, my heart falls into my trousers.”

Röhm still lived. Hitler hesitated to order Röhm’s murder because the saber-scarred veteran had stood with the Führer in Munich in 1923. On Sunday Himmler and Göring convinced him to have Röhm killed, but he hoped his old fellow revolutionary could be coaxed into committing suicide. Himmler gave the assignment to Theodor Eicke, his commandant at Dachau, a thick-necked pipe smoker and a fully malefic killer. Eicke drove with two deputies to Stadelheim, where Röhm was jailed, explained his purpose, left a pistol on a small table at the door of the cell and stepped out to wait. Röhm chose not to take the bait. Eicke had the pistol removed and then returned to the cell with one of his deputies, weapons at the ready, to find Röhm, a fireplug of a man, standing barechested. He started to speak to them and they shot him.

One hundred forty-two SS officers, Heydrich first among them, received promotions within the week, and on 20 July 1934 the SS won its independence from subordination to the SA. Hitler took to calling Himmler “der treue Heinrich”—the loyal Heinrich, truehearted Heinrich. “For us as Secret State Police and as members of the SS,” truehearted Heinrich would tell his Gestapo subordinates in October, “30 June was not — as several believe—a day of victory or a day of triumph. Rather, it was the hardest day that can be visited on a soldier in his lifetime. To have to shoot one’s own comrades, with whom one has stood side by side for eight or ten years in the struggle for an ideal, and who had then failed, is the bitterest thing that can happen to a man.” No doubt he felt that way, though he had done none of the shooting himself. (Heydrich expressed similar ambivalence at his dirty duties, commenting to a colleague once, “People abroad take us for bloodhounds, don’t they? It is almost too hard for the individual, but we must be hard as granite.”) Himmler went on to blame Röhm’s fall on “Jews, Freemasons and Catholics.”

Two years later, increasingly confident that he had successfully disguised his cowardice with delegated menace, Himmler would write in an SS pamphlet: “I know that there are people in Germany now who become sick when they see these black uniforms. We know the reason and we do not expect to be loved by too many.” Nearly on the second anniversary of the Röhm Purge, on 17 June 1936, Hitler further rewarded Himmler by appointing him Chief of the German Police, making him responsible at thirty-five years of age for all the police functions of the Third Reich. (His full title was now Reichsführer-SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei.) He reorganized the police into two divisions, the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) under Heydrich and the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) under Daluege. (The separation explains the separation of his mobile killing forces in the occupied East into Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions, further augmented by native auxiliaries under the authority of the Higher SS and Police Leaders whom Himmler appointed to serve as his deputies in the occupied territories.) He understood his primary police responsibility to be prevention, and was prepared to place tens of thousands of citizens who had committed no crimes under preventive arrest, a fate that in March 1937 befell several thousand felons with previous convictions, who were rounded up and incarcerated in concentration camps. The violent among this lot would serve in time as kapos—inmate orderlies — adept at brutalizing political prisoners and Jews; some of the worst would be recruited into an SS punitive battalion, SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger — named after its violently sadistic commander, Oskar Dirlewanger—that fought partisans, raped and tortured young women and slaughtered Jews Einsatzgruppen-style in Byelorussia beginning in 1942.

Whatever mystical brotherhood the East represented to Heinrich Himmler, to Adolf Hitler the East represented the German equivalent of the British and French colonial empires. “From the purely territorial point of view,” he wrote in
Mein Kampf,
“the area of the German Reich vanishes completely as compared with that of the so-called world powers. Let no one cite England as a proof to the contrary, for England in reality is merely the great capital of the British world empire which calls nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface its own.” In consequence, Hitler concluded urgently, “The National Socialist movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area — viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics.” At one of his table talks in the first months after Barbarossa, he drew the parallel explicitly. “The Russian space is our India,” he told his staff and guests. “Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.” He went on to talk about supplying grain to all of Europe from the Ukraine. “The Crimea will give us its citrus fruits, cotton and rubber (100,000 acres of [rubber tree] plantation would be enough to ensure our independence).” In return, he added derisively, “We’ll supply the Ukrainians with scarves, glass beads and everything that colonial people like.” The Slavs, he claimed, were “a mass of born slaves who feel the need of a master.”

This parallelism between the beckoning East and the British and French colonial empires, which most Holocaust historians have ignored, goes far to explain Hitler’s exterminationist program, as Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist explains:

In this [historical] debate no one mentions the German extermination of the Herero people in southwest Africa during Hitler’s childhood. No one mentions the corresponding genocide [of indigenous peoples] by the French, the British, or the Americans. No one points out that during Hitler’s childhood, a major element in the European view of mankind was the conviction that “inferior races” were by nature condemned to extinction: the true compassion of the superior races consisted in helping them on the way.

(In 1904 in German Southwest Africa—modern Namibia — disputes and misunderstandings between the colonial government, German settlers and Herero leaders led to armed conflict. German marines arrived from the coast and began lynching Herero men and slaughtering Herero women and children; letters by a Herero leader purporting to reveal a call to tribal insurrection were published in Germany and came to the attention of the Kaiser; the Kaiser sent out Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha with full authority, in von Trotha’s words, to “annihilate these masses.” With troops and cannon von Trotha drove the Herero eastward into the Kalahari Desert. When the Herero offered to surrender, he issued a proclamation that has come to be known as the Vernichtungsbefehl — the Extermination Order — telling them that they were no longer German subjects, that they must leave the land and that any Herero found “within the German borders . . . with or without a gun, with or without cattle, [would] be shot.” He then occupied the line of water holes at the western edge of the Kalahari and waited for the Herero nation to die in the desert of thirst. His rationalizations for this action would echo in the rationalizations of the Third Reich: “I find it most appropriate that the nation perishes instead of infecting our soldiers and diminishing their supplies of water and food.” “The exercise of violence with crass terrorism and even with gruesomeness was and is my policy. I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain.” Lindqvist concludes the story: “When the rainy season came, German patrols found skeletons lying around dry hollows, twenty-four to fifty feet deep, dug by the Hereros in vain attempts to find water. Almost the entire people—about eighty thousand human beings — died in the deserts. Only a few thousand were left, sentenced to hard labor in German concentration camps.”)

Hitler was aware of the American assault on native populations through his lifelong reading and rereading of the German cowboy-western novelist Karl May (he was still reading May in his bunker years later in the war). He connected May’s “Redskins” with the Russian “natives” explicitly in another of his table talks: Speaking of what he called “this Russian desert,” he asserted, “We shall populate it. . . . We’ll take away its character of an Asiatic steppe, we’ll Europeanize it. With this object, we have undertaken the construction of roads that will lead to the southernmost point of the Crimea and to the Caucasus. These roads will be studded along their whole length with German towns, and around these towns our colonists will settle.” As for “the natives”:

We’ll have to screen them carefully. The Jew, that destroyer, we shall drive out. As far as the population is concerned, I get a better impression in White Russia [Byelorussia] than in the Ukraine. . . .

And above all, no remorse on this subject! We’re not going to play children’s nurses; we’re absolutely without obligation as far as these people are concerned. . . .

There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins. . . .

In this business I shall go straight ahead, cold-bloodedly. . . . I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.

Such conquest had been rationalized long before by apologists for imperialism. The British liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer had argued the case as early as 1850 in his book
Social Statics.
“The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness,” Spencer wrote, “taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way. . . . Be he human or be he brute, the hindrance must be got rid of.” Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin’s competitor, debating the extinction of the “lower” races before the London Anthropological Society in 1864, characterized the extermination of populations as a form of natural selection. He compared Europeans to their weeds: Europeans compete successfully against indigenous peoples, he argued, “just as the weeds of Europe overrun North America and Australia, extinguishing native productions by the inherent vigor of their organization, and by their greater capacity for existence and multiplication.”