The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (11 page)

3. GESTAPO PERSONNEL: WAS THERE A PURGE OF THE POLICE?

It has been claimed that following the Nazi 'seizure of power' the ranks of the police were 'cleaned out' and replaced with card-carrying Nazis. Members of the new Gestapo were allegedly drawn primarily from the SS, who were much preferred to those in the old political police forces inherited from the Weimar Republic.'
In fact, considerable evidence exists that many officials were coopted and continued to serve: the supposed purge was not nearly as widespread as is sometimes claimed.

In their autobiographical accounts and in post-war trials leading Gestapo figures have generally put forward the view that many (non-Nazi) career policemen merely stayed at their desks and simply continued their work, eventually becoming members of the Party and/or the SS. This is a striking theme in the testimony of those heard at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal after 1945. Werner Best, one-time head of training, personnel, and organization at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, a trained lawyer, and a man who played a vital part in building up the Gestapo, maintained that there were relatively few contacts between the NSDAP and the police before 1933, and believed that, far from there having been any significant purge of the political police across the country in the wake of the 'seizure of power' most people were kept on. As an example from his own experience he mentioned the Hessian police chief who was allowed to stay in office even though he was a known Freemason and democrat. Best said that the most spectacular example of all was that of another non-Nazi, Heinrich Muller, who later became head of the Gestapo itself under Himmler and Heydrich.19
As the need arose, the Gestapo recruited new officials from various police branches but took 'only relatively few' from the SS, SA, or Nazi Party; belonging to 'police agencies was not highly paid and therefore was not very much sought after'.20

Cross-examined over an apparent contradiction between his testimony at Nuremberg and a famous book he had penned in 1941, Best insisted that while SS members who applied to join the Gestapo were duly considered, he
had given no 'ratio of figures' in his book. It was true, he said, that in time more of the new members taken in were in the SS, but this was not initially the case. 'I can say again today that the number of the regular officialsthose old officials previously taken over as well as the candidates from the protection police'-that is, the regular police-'was much higher than the number taken in from the SS.'21
One former local Gestapo deputy chief had the impression that 'on the whole' the officials there 'had been detailed or transferred to the State Police' and 'had entered the police before 1933'.22
Robert Koehl's recent study reinforces Best's account. In 1939, he maintains, 'only 3,000 Gestapo officials out of 20,000 had SS rank', and the proportion in the other two main police forces 'was even less, though sizeable in absolute terms'.23

Otto Ohlendorf, later head of the SD, shared these views. As he said at Nuremberg:

When I became acquainted with the State Police it was certainly true that the nucleus of expert personnel had been taken from the Criminal Police and the majority of the leading men in the State Police offices, that is, in the regional offices of the State Police, had risen from the ranks of the civil administration, possibly also from the Police administrations of the various Lander [Ldnderpolizeiverwaltungen], and that they had, in part, even been detailed from the civil administration. The same was true for the experts within Amt IV-the Gestapo.24

Ohlendorf believed that while career civil servants probably made up the majority of the Gestapo in the early years of the Third Reich, by the time the war came 'that probably was no longer the case', if only because members of the Gestapo included numerous clerks and assistants of various kinds. He felt, on the other hand, that as a rule the preponderance of civil servants continued 'insofar as the specialists were concerned'.25

Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapa under Goring in Berlin, claimed that he had not been interested in a purge of the police. A man whom Diels recruited, who was later sacked and eventually became an opponent of Nazism, said that many of the higher officials assigned to the Gestapo `were by no means all Nazis. For the most part they were young professional civil service officers who felt ashamed at having been placed in this den of thieves. If they had obtained any support from their chief-who knows whether they might not have reduced the chaotic stronghold into an asylum of public
order?
12' Diels deliberately selected higher officials 'who were not good Nazisnone of his subordinates would then enjoy the full confidence of the Party'.21
Diels's own account points to the 'insignificant changes' in the personnel of the Prussian Gestapo during its initial establishment under his hand in 1933; some new members brought in were simply ambitious, but others, such as the senior official Arthur Nebe, a highly respected detective who was (initially) a true believer in Nazism (but who later joined the conspiracy against Hitler), were inclined to think that more 'law and order' and tighter police administration would be a good thing.2S
Diels maintained in his memoirs that the people he recruited were not opportunists, remained moral, Christian, and in the main not Party members; 'Goring did not demand it. To be sure, in the course of time one had to dress oneself in brown or black'-that is, join the Party or the SS.29
Diels blamed the problems of the later Gestapo on Himmler, so that there is some self-justification and apology in his remarks, and those in the know at the time saw Diels himself as one of the 'March casualties', one of those who converted to Nazism after the elections that month in order to reap the benefits.;"

Do these and other similar accounts hold up under close scrutiny? Christoph Graf studies the development of the Gestapo in Prussia during the transition phase from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi dictatorship, and especially the part played by Diels. Graf argues that relatively few open and early sympathizers of Nazism show up in the biographies of later Gestapo officials because until 20 July 1932 all participation by officials in Nazism was forbidden and taboo, a fact of particular importance to anyone in the Political Police. Any such activity had to be kept secret. The same was generally true everywhere in Germany. Benno Martin, for example, Police President of Nuremberg from 1934, and in the upper echelons of the local force from as early as 1925, later admitted to having had contacts with the NSDAP before 19 3 3, although these had been hushed up until after the 'seizure of power'.31

However, it is not so clear that Graf has fully refuted Diels, Best, Ohlendorf, and the others. It is true that the Berlin headquarters were hardly an 'apolitical' force, as Graf makes clear. Among these people there was a good deal of sympathy for Nazism (at least for right-wing politics); between one-fifth and two-fifths of them even held membership of Nazi vocational organizations (Fachschaften) before 1933. However, there was no wholesale purge, in the sense of simply replacing the older police across the board.

Graf himself shows that many officials within the Berlin headquarters of
the Gestapo stayed at their desks, just as Diels and others said they did. A major reason for their continuing in office, he suggests, was a lack of alternatives due to a clearing out of possible opponents in the summer of 1932, thanks to the efforts of Franz von Papen.32
Of the officials who managed to survive this event and the Nazi 'co-ordination' period, more than half of the 'older custodians' (that is, those in service before 1933) did not leave and were still there into the war-years.33
Far from being merely political appointees, half of them had been trained as 'full jurists', and, especially in the Criminal Police service, many held doctorates.34
One account based on the study of 13 5 officials who served in the RSHA-therefore at the highest levels, where political convictions were important-a study otherwise sceptical of claims made by Diels and others, remarked that in the Gestapo under Diels's command 'the older career officials still dominated until 1934', and even afterwards there was a continuing 'need for specialists'.35

Graf has mixed up two questions, the one dealing with a supposed purge, the other with the political beliefs of Gestapo officials. He perhaps went astray when he generalized from an analysis restricted to the transition phase under Diels (roughly 1932-4). He identified 65 officials in the Berlin headquarters of the Gestapo under Diels, although for the country as a whole there were perhaps 3,000 of them at the beginning of 1933.36
But, more importantly, his object of investigation was the capital city of Prussia and Germany, where political trustworthiness came in for especially close scrutiny. He failed to see that, as a body, this echelon combined a good deal of technical expertise and appropriate political beliefs, so that any purge would have been unnecessary, even if it had been desirable. What was it like elsewhere?

Outside Gestapo headquarters in Berlin most people who ended up in the Gestapo were not previously connected with Nazism. To be sure that would not officially have been allowed in the Weimar days, as already mentioned. Still, no case has yet come to light of a local purge of major proportions, although such a move was definitely within the realm of possibility. Keeping in mind the obvious intent of affidavits submitted by individual Gestapo members to the Nuremberg trials, it is worth noting that 665 of them mention
the issue of membership, and state that 'when the Gestapo was created, the requirements for personnel were for the most part met out of the existing Political Police'.37
A detailed examination of the personnel in the Wurzburg Gestapo (below) reinforces that contention.

In cities as far apart as Bremen, Hamburg, and Munich, the men who made up the variously named 'political police' forces tended to be conservative, nationalist, and 'correct'-and, to say the least, more than reserved when it came to supporting any of the left-wing parties. In Bremen, according to two recent accounts, there was a considerable degree of personnel and institutional carry-over from the older political police (the Zentral- polizeistelle).3"
It is also true that an approach based on something like a spoils system was taken to appointments to the Gestapo, so that there was a gradual infiltration by members of the Party, SS, and SA. Those who did not have the necessary qualifications might be taken on as relatively unimportant 'employees' for a time.39
Marssolek and Ott's point about Bremen would seem to fit the pattern across the country very well:

Finally, the great continuity is remarkable within the Bremen Gestapo at the level of the middle-rank officers. Herrlein, Ripke, Parchmann, and Hafemann remained from beginning to end, albeit not above the function of section-leaders [Referatsleitern]. This continuity required an intimacy of the persecutors with the resistance-at least with parts of it.41

When obvious political appointees from the Party, SA, or SS-such as Hamburg's Political Police chief from March to May 1933, Anatol Milewski- Schroeden-slid not measure up to the 'professional' demands of the job, the reins were quickly returned to more qualified people, especially those in the older department in charge of fighting 'Marxism and Communism'.41
Peter Kraus, for many years a leading light in the Hamburg Political Police (called in that city the 'Staatspolizei' since 1927), and active sympathizer with the Nazi Party since 1932, stayed in office (as did most of the fifty-six others from the old Political Police) and led the fight against the Communists.42
While the Nazis in Hamburg, as elsewhere, did not want the political police in the
hands of non-political experts, it is clear that political convictions were never sufficient. There were chaotic times in the changeover years of 1933 and 1934; the many policemen who stayed in the service in time came to forget or ignore the letter of the law, and, encouraged by their superiors to fulfil their duties in 'the interest of national security', gave full rein to hatred and brutality.43

In Munich Himmler set about establishing a reliable political police force from the moment he was given the position of Bavaria's Police Commander. With the able assistance of Heydrich he recruited initially some 152 'welltrained' persons from various levels of service and branches of the Munich police.44
As elsewhere, some were in the Nazi Party, but most were not. The new police (BPP) grew rapidly; a number of SS were taken on but appear mainly as assistants (Hilfskr5fte).45
Several of the new recruits in Bavaria are worth a brief mention because the individuals involved seem representative of the ways in which the new political police co-opted long-serving (nonNazi) experts and tempted them to stay on.

One of the most able officials was Heinrich Muller, a man who later (1939) became head of the Gestapo under Himmler and held the position throughout the war-years. One Nazi insider and opponent of Muller, Walter Schellenberg (one of the heads of SD), recalled his first meeting with the boorish Muller. Apart from his appearance, about which Schellenberg had some unflattering things to say, it was noted that

although he had worked his way up to the top, he could never forget his origin. He once said to me in his crude Bavarian accent, 'One really ought to drive all the intellectuals into a coal mine and then blow it up.' Any form of real conversation with him was almost impossible: it consisted on his part almost entirely of coldly phrased questions and was largely an interrogation."

Heinrich Muller was born in Munich on 28 April 19oo, the son of Catholic parents, his father a minor rural police official. Heinrich participated in the First World War from 1917 and, as a flyer, earned decorations, among them the Iron Cross (1st class). After the war he entered the Munich Metropolitan Police, in which, thanks to great energy, he rose quickly. He was involved in the political police department, where he specialized in left-wing parties and groups. A compliment of sorts was paid to Muller in a political evaluation made in early 1937: