Heinrich Himmler: The SS, Gestapo, His Life and Career

II. Reichsführer S.S.

Though the appointment of Himmler to the command of the S.S. was for Hitler a matter of expediency, for the man himself it was a moment of fulfilment. He was now Reichsführer S.S. This new, high-sounding title was in itself a challenge to his tenacity and an inspiration to the particular vision germinating in his brain, his own interpretation of what Hitler, with his aid, might make of the German people in the distant future.

Himmler was now twenty-eight, a young man with a pregnant wife older than himself, and a modest smallholding. To be Reichsführer S.S. based on Munich was to be in command of less than 300 men, and there were limits even to this very minor place of power. In Berlin, the centre of radical action stirred up by Goebbels’s violent propaganda, Kurt Daluege was also appointed by Hitler to be head of the local S.S. and empowered to operate independently of Himmler, who was in any case regarded, along with his force, as subordinate not only to Hitler but to the general organization of the S.A., the brownshirt Party battalions on the streets. The S.S. was in fact a force within a force, its special task nominally the protection of Hitler and other Nazi leaders at meetings, rallies and parades. But, according to Gunther d’Alquen, who was later to become editor of Das Schwarze Korps, the special journal of the S.S., Hitler had instructed his Reichsführer S.S. to make the corps into an utterly dependable body of carefully selected men.

Himmler was therefore able to indulge his vision. In spite of his sloping shoulders, his close-cropped hair, his neatly trimmed moustache and rimless pince-nez with its ear-chains suitable for a respectable clerk, he saw his unit of Black Guards as an elite band of warriors whose unique character would elevate them far above the street-ruffians of the S.A. They were to be made into Hitler’s knights-at-arms.

This elevation of his men became Himmler’s great obsession. The fact that he played comparatively little part in the day-by-day strategy and intrigue with which Hitler, Goring and Goebbels worked their way to power between 1929 and 1933 did not at this stage trouble him. He had his own bright, particular star to follow. His immediate ambitions in the Party were fulfilled for a while by his command of the S.S. and by the seat in the Reichstag that was allocated to him after the 1930 elections. His domestic ambitions, such as they might be, were fulfilled when his wife had given birth to their child, Gudrun, in 1929. Marga Himmler was attended by a Dr Brack, whose son, Dr Viktor Brack, was some twelve years later to take charge of Himmler’s euthanasia programme, after first serving him in the capacity of a chauffeur.

The S.S. did not expand suddenly under Himmler’s leadership. The years 1929 and 1930 represent primarily a period of preparation; the final stage of expansion came later, as we shall see, during 1931, when many thousands of men were added to the force. Their initial duties, when the S.S. had been summoned to roll-calls and allocated in groups to accompany various Party speakers to their meetings, were by then superseded; by 1931 the S.S. had other work, at once more secret and more spectacular.

The first substantial stage in the establishment of a permanent, élite corps came when Himmler issued, in January 1932, the notorious marriage code for the members of the S.S. The code was based on the principles outlined by Walter Darré in his book Um Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), which was published under the auspices of the Party in Munich in 1929.

Darré was Hitler’s agricultural expert, and he had come to believe in selective breeding as a result of his studies. He was born in the Argentine in 1895, and had been educated in England at King’s College School, Wimbledon. He had for a while been a civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, but had been dismissed in 1929 after a disagreement with his colleagues. In the same year he published a book on the peasantry as the life source of the Nordic race. His ambition was to become Reich Minister of Agriculture, and this indeed is what he became in 1933.

Darré is of importance only because of the hardening influence he had on certain of Himmler’s prejudices, which were later to develop into dire obsessions. Darré was some five years older than Himmler, and in a movement that found it expedient to encourage unscientific theories if the results arrived at were useful as propaganda, Darré became an accepted ‘thinker’ on behalf of the Nazis, closely linked with Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal propounders of the myth which convinced the Party that the true Germans possessed a unique racial superiority.

Rosenberg was of German stock, but he had been born in the Baltic town of Reval and had studied architecture in Moscow before escaping to Germany at the time of the Russian Revolution. He had become editor of Hitler’s journal Völkischer Beobachter in 1923. In his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, he declared the humane ideals of Christian Europe to be a useless creed. What Europe needed, he said, was to be freed from the soft, abstract Christian principles derived from Asia Minor and the East, and to discover a new philosophy, which would be rooted once more in the entrails of the earth and recognize the racial superiority and cleanliness of Nordic man. ‘A culture always decays’, wrote Rosenberg, ‘when humanitarian ideals… obstruct the right of the dominant race to rule those it has subjugated.’ He saw in the German people the race endowed by nature with a true, mystic understanding, a ‘religion of the blood’. Christianity, on the other hand, taught the decadent doctrine that all races shared an equality of soul, which the German race would soon show to be nothing but a vicious and insidious illusion.

In place of the meek and all-forgiving, Rosenberg created the ideal of the ‘powerful, earth-bound figure’, the ‘strong peasant’, and it was at this point that Darré, Rosenberg’s disciple and Himmler’s teacher, took over the spiritual education of his leader.

In Blood and Soil, Darré gave his reasons why the German race was so especially privileged. His assumptions were based on the essential nobility of the Nordic peasantry, whose blood was as rich and fruitful as the soil they tilled. So great was their virtue that the future strength of Europe depended on the survival of their stock; it was essential they should breed and multiply until their blond and shining youth outnumbered and outfaced the lurking, decadent Slavs and Jews, whose blood was poison to the human race and whose haunts were the healthless streets of towns and cities.¹

Himmler’s energies during this initial period were, as we have said, devoted to the theory and practice of the S.S. In 1931 Darré joined his staff to organize the department known as the Race and Settlement Office, Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (R.U.S.H.A.). This office was set up to determine the racial standards required of good German stock, to conduct research into the surviving ethnic groups in Europe that could be claimed as German, and to decide all matters connected with the descent of individuals at home and abroad about whom there were any racial doubts. Darré remained in charge of this office with its increasing powers until 1938, though he was also, from 1933, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture. It was with his aid that searching tests were devized for the brides of S.S. men and made obligatory in the notorious Marriage Law of the S.S., dated 31 December 1931 and coming into force the following day.

In its opening paragraphs, Himmler’s Marriage Law insisted on the importance of maintaining the high standard of blood in the S.S.² The principal clauses that followed filled many unmarried S.S. men with dismay:

Himmler ended his Marriage Code with a defiant flourish:

Himmler’s Marriage Code for members of the S.S. required every man who wanted to marry to obtain a certificate of approval for his bride in order that the purity of the Nordic stock which he already represented should be maintained unimpaired in the blood of his descendants.

The Office kept stud records for every S.S. man, who was issued with a genealogical or clan book (Sippenbuch)³ which recorded his right and duty to mate with his chosen woman and procreate children by her. His bride and her parents were required to prove that they were free of all disease, mental or physical, and the girl was meticulously examined and measured by S.S. doctors who had to satisfy themselves that she could be suitably fertile. The Aryan blood of her ancestors, uncontaminated by Slav, Jewish or other inferior racial elements, had to be established as far back as 1750 for every woman marrying into the S.S.

Later Himmler was to set up a number of S.S. Bride Schools at which, in addition to their political education, the future wives of S.S. men were taught housewifery, the hygiene of childbirth and the principles of rearing their future children in the correct Nazi tradition.

The order, as inhuman as it was outrageous, lay at the heart of Himmler’s future racial policy, and what seemed at first to be merely an absurdity to some of Himmler’s own colleagues was later to become the poisonous root from which sprang the practice of compulsory euthanasia and the genocide of those he regarded as racially impure.

The significance of the S.S. Marriage Code must be understood in its proper light. It could be claimed that, in introducing eugenics and selective breeding among the restricted group of men in his charge, Himmler was anticipating a principle which civilized societies will be led to adopt in the future. He would most certainly have argued himself that this was so. But if such principles are eventually to be adopted, there must surely be every medical, psychological and social safeguard to ensure that the men and women who are bred represent in one way or another the widest capabilities and qualities latent in the human race. It is not necessarily to Himmler’s discredit that he was ambitious to see the human race improved; but it was pernicious that he believed himself fit, together with a few unqualified and unscrupulous colleagues, to determine what the ideal human being should be. He had absorbed a few ill-founded theories and with the temerity of ignorance hastened to put them into immediate practice without taking any account of the cost in human suffering. Thus the men who had through various motives, either worthy and unworthy, joined the S.S. found themselves caught in a ludicrous trap, and had either to submit to Himmler’s oppressive decrees or find methods of evasion which soon became common practice not only in the S.S. but in the whole of Nazi society as the oppression spread.

Himmler’s ideal man was a fair-haired, blue-eyed, superhuman athlete whose values were derived from a medieval concept of relationship with the cultivation of the earth, a man who despised most developments in modern culture because he had no judgment in such matters, though like Heydrich, he might well play accepted music on the violin or read accepted books. He was a man who left all political and social judgment to his leaders, and gave them his unquestioning obedience. Though he might well be in private a kindly husband and an indulgent father, he was essentially a destructive man, ready to act on the vilest or most stupid orders that only served to show the prejudice and cruelty of his commanders. This image of the ideal man, primitive in his outlook and brutal in his behaviour, was the result of the racial intolerance of Rosenberg, Darré and Himmler, whose collective vision was blinded by the same false idea of past glories which bore no relation whatever to historic truth, to the needs of modern society, or to any future social order which might be called civilized.

It was in June of the year when Darré and Himmler were concocting their marriage code that a man arrived to help them who had all the appearance of a young Messiah. Himmler was approached by one of his staff, the Freiherr von Eberstein, with a request that he interview a young man who had recently joined the S.S. in Hamburg. His name was Reinhard Heydrich; he was of good family and had until recently been a lieutenant in the Navy. Heydrich was a godson of Eberstein’s mother. Himmler agreed, then fell ill and cancelled the appointment. Heydrich took no notice of the cancellation and travelled overnight south to Munich, relying on Eberstein to arrange for him to see Himmler, who had returned to his poultry farm to recover from his sickness. Himmler agreed over the telephone that, since Heydrich had come to Munich, he should visit him in Waldtrudering.

The first meeting between these two men, whose strange relationship was to constitute the direst threat to the well-being of Europe that resulted from conquest by Hitler, took place on 4 June 1931. Himmler understood that Heydrich had been a naval Intelligence officer, and he had a particular, important task in mind which he felt might be carried out by a man with this kind of background and training. He wanted to establish an Intelligence or security service of his own within the S.S. to conduct secret research into those members of the Party, particularly among the leaders of the S.A., whose ambitions seemed hostile to his own, or whose presence degraded the ideals of the Party as he conceived them.

The young man who came down to Waldtrudering was of impressive appearance. He was tall and blond, blue-eyed and Nordic, with a model physique that corresponded exactly to Himmler’s conception of what an S.S. man should be. His eyes, in fact, were of a peculiar lightness, piercing and hypnotic. Although there was some mistake in his records (he had been a code and signals officer in naval Intelligence, not an Intelligence officer), his handsome bearing and assurance of manner made an immediate impression on Himmler, whose diffidence of nature always made him nervous when he had to deal with men of a capacity greater than his own. In order to assert himself, Himmler set Heydrich a written test, like a schoolmaster sizing up an over-bright pupil; first he described to him the kind of Intelligence service he had in mind, and then invited Heydrich to outline on paper how he would set about organizing it. He gave him twenty minutes to complete the project, and Heydrich seized this chance to impress still further a man whose limitation of character he could already sense. Himmler read the paper and offered him a post on his personal staff as head of an entirely new department in the S.S., the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) or Security Service.

During the next ten years Heydrich was to create a network of power which was eventually to threaten not only his master but every other member of the Nazi leadership, including Hitler himself. This cold and brutally handsome man, three and a half years younger than Himmler, was the son of a distinguished teacher of music, who had once been a performer in opera and came, like Himmler’s mother, from a musical family. Heydrich’s second name was Tristan, and he had begun his own musical studies at an early age. He became an outstanding violinist, but his musical talents did not prevent him undergoing the strict training given to schoolboys at the school in Halle, where the family lived. He was brilliant at school, and it seemed that he could have succeeded equally well in an academic or musical career. He was also a skilled athlete and a notable fencer. His mother, who was a strict Catholic, brought her son up in the Catholic faith; scepticism, however, seems to have developed fairly early in his cold and cruelly intelligent nature, and the traditional faith of his family in German nationalism led him at the age of sixteen to join the nationalist Free Corps movement that spread throughout Germany after the First World War. He decided to abandon a career in music and train to become an officer in the Navy.

His character was already well developed. He was alert, filled with a nervous energy, restless, hard-working, strong-willed and intolerant. His lean face was hard and ruthless, and he had grown over six feet tall. As a naval cadet he soon mastered the technicalities of navigation and he charmed the wife of Commander Canaris, the First Officer of the training cruiser on which he was stationed, by playing to her on the violin. He was invited by Frau Canaris to form a quartet for the performance of chamber music. Meanwhile, his energetic mind turned to the study of languages, and he rapidly gained a fair knowledge of English, French and Russian. He also began to develop his lifelong taste for philandering. In 1926 he was promoted lieutenant, and in 1928, at his own request, he was made a signals and radio officer stationed at Kiel. Here one night at a ball held just before Christmas in 1930 he met a beautiful girl of nineteen, Lina Mathilde von Osten, who was as blonde as himself. Within three days they had become engaged, in spite of the fact that a scandal arose because another blonde girl, the daughter of a prominent industrialist, claimed he was in love with her and she with him. The industrialist, who, unfortunately for Heydrich, was a friend of the Grand Admiral Raeder, used his influence to have Heydrich dismissed the service when he refused to break his official engagement and marry the other girl. He was required to resign his commission in April 1931, and his fiancée insisted on maintaining her engagement to him in spite of the opposition of her parents now that he was disgraced.⁴

Heydrich took his dismissal very badly. He wept, the only time he ever did so in Lina’s presence. He could think of no future for himself outside the services. But Lina von Osten had other ideas. She was a passionate Nazi, whose conversion had started when at the age of sixteen she had first heard Hitler speak at a meeting in Kiel. She knew all about the S.S., and believed that in this movement there should be a place for so talented and handsome an officer as her unemployed lover. He responded to her enthusiasm and joined the Party, and it was her resolution that eventually persuaded him to make the contact with Eberstein that led to his visit to Himmler in June.⁵

Himmler, though in many respects a weak man, was nevertheless astute and calculating. Throughout his career as head of the S.S. he surrounded himself with men who in one way or another compensated for whatever was lacking in his own nature, while at the same time ensuring that they remained his servants. He used their strength, their brutality, or their intelligence to fulfil his purpose for him in whatever portion of his total plan it suited him to place them. Since, unlike Goring or Goebbels, he preferred to hover in the background out of the public eye, except on those formal occasions when it was necessary for him to be seen alongside the other leaders, he was not averse to letting his subordinates act as his agents while he kept out of sight, the spider silently operating at the centre of his web. But in Heydrich Himmler met a man who became his match. Heydrich was quick to realize the intentions of the Reichsführer S.S. and to exploit them for his own purposes, while carefully posing in his presence and that of others as a dutiful subordinate. Yet a kind of dubious, mutual respect existed between the two men which amounted in Himmler’s case to a form of affection; they shared the same negative ideals, though in nature and temperament they could not have been more diverse. For the next ten years, however, they were to be bound together, each man the other’s evil genius, until Heydrich’s assassination in 1942 suddenly removed him at a time when, in the estimation of many who knew him well, he was preparing to supersede Himmler and even outbid Hitler for power during this final period, for the Führer’s leadership was undermined by his own obsessions and threatened by the intrigues of his subordinates.

In June 1931, at the age of twenty-seven, Heydrich gladly accepted this minor post in the S.S. in which an increasing number of men of officer rank and even of aristocratic background were enlisting. He took up his duties in Munich officially on 10 August, and by Christmas had been promoted to the rank of a major in the S.S. At the same time, on 26 December, he married his resolute fiancée Lina von Osten, who was then only twenty years old. Major Heydrich’s salary was RM 180 a month, or about £15,⁶ and from the start he began the patient and methodical compilation of secret information on the private lives of men and women inside and, when it was likely to prove useful, outside the Party as well. By the end of the year he had assembled a small staff of helpers, and in 1932 (during a period of which, April to July, the S.A. and S.S. organizations were, officially at least, disbanded by the German government), Himmler used Heydrich’s skill and experience to help him reorganize the whole movement. In the summer Heydrich was promoted a colonel and given the title of Chief of the Sicherheitsdienst, but by then his influence was spread throughout the service, and he founded for Himmler an S.S. Junkerschule,⁷ an elite leadership school at Bad-Toelz in Upper Bavaria.

By now the S.S. was a substantial force. Although the original 280 men whom Himmler found under him in January 1929 had increased by January 1931 to only 400 enlisted members, supplemented by some 1,500 part-time recruits, there were by the time the Brüning government disbanded the S.A. and the S.S. in April 1932 as many as 30,000 S.S. men. The organization, however, still remained nominally a part of the S.A.

With the rapid growth of the S.S., a more comprehensive form of para-military organization had to be devised. In this Himmler sought the advice of Heydrich who, in addition to his organization of the S.D., became in effect Himmler’s Chief of Staff in the development of the S.S. as a whole, which was spread in units throughout Germany. Officers in certain centres such as Berlin, where Daluege controlled the S.S., acted with complete independence, and paid little or no attention to headquarters in Munich. The S.S. was now subjected to specialist departments for administration, training and discipline; among them was Heydrich’s unit which, while claiming to be the intelligence section, was in fact a highly organized spy-ring with an increasing network of carefully graded agents and informers. A filing system was devised so that every useful detail about the public and private lives of every individual working for or against the Party, whether he was inside or outside it, was recorded, more especially if the information was of such a nature that it could at any time in the future be extracted and used as a weapon against him. The ultimate strength of Himmler and Heydrich came very much to depend on the fear the existence of these files generated once it became known that they were the closely-guarded possession of the S.D. Heydrich modelled his department on what he regarded as the British spy system, which he held to be the most efficient in the world.

The year 1932 was a period of difficulty and dissension for the Party. Hitler’s instinctive sense of caution and self-protection led him to counterbalance the growing powers of his subordinates by creating for them overlapping functions, so that they expended their excess energies in the exercise of mutual distrust, and were to a considerable extent neutralized through their own intrigue. He encouraged the development of the S.S. not only because it provided the movement with a superior, class-conscious force that encouraged former officers and men of the upper class to join its ranks, but also because the rapid increase of its numbers helped to counterbalance the unruly private army of the S.A. This numbered by 1930 some 100,000 men, drawn mostly from the unemployed, and it was giving Hitler considerable trouble at the very time when he needed the support of the right-wing politicians and industrialists.

The ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of the Party were in a state of open dissension, and in September 1930, the month of the elections in which the Party hoped to win many more seats in the Reichstag, the S.A. went so far as to storm the Party offices in Berlin so as to give an open demonstration of their anger when Otto Strasser, the man they regarded as their champion, was dismissed from the Party. He and Stennes were embarrassing Hitler’s attempts to win support from the Right. Only firm action by Hitler had stopped a catastrophe: to placate these unruly men he made himself Commander of the S.A. Exploiting the crisis of the unemployed, the Nazis won a substantial victory at the polls which entitled them to 107 seats in the Reichstag. It was then, in January 1931, that Hitler called on his old supporter Roehm, who had been working as a military instructor in Bolivia, to return to Germany and become Chief of Staff of the S.A. This appointment introduced a new, intrusive figure into the private world of Himmler and Heydrich. Roehm, a professional soldier, able and ambitious, imposed a new discipline on the S.A., of which the S.S. remained a part, while at the same time he entered into the round of political intrigue of which Goring was the principal agent and Goebbels the propagandist. The fact that Roehm was a notorious homosexual was to prove invaluable for Heydrich’s files, but in the meantime it became obvious that Himmler’s position in the Party and his relationship to Hitler and the other leaders must be more clearly worked out.⁸

Himmler never became a member of Hitler’s more intimate social circle, certainly never in the sense that Goebbels or Goring rivalled each other in entertaining the leader, taking meals with him or accompanying him as confidential adviser on his missions. Hitler never stayed at Himmler’s house in Gmund, though he made occasional brief visits. Himmler, hiding his ambitions under a kind of obsequious devotion to service, accepted a lower level of influence during this crucial period in Hitler’s formidable onslaught on the succession of weak and crumbling governments in the Reichstag. It is true that he had become a Party deputy in the Reichstag in 1930,⁹ but unlike Goring or Goebbels, he took no prominent part in the acrimonious and violent exchanges which Goring largely engineered in order to bring discredit to the Reichstag as a machine of government. His part in the Reichstag was that of the supporter of policies determined by others, and a revealing glimpse of him has been recorded on the day when Goring, as President of the Reichstag, outmanoeuvred von Papen’s government and secured the dissolution of the Chamber. It was Himmler, resplendent in his black uniform, his pince-nez secure, who hurried from the Reichstag during the recess to fetch Hitler to a conference at Göring’s presidential palace. He beamed, he clicked his heels, he Heil-Hitlered, and he urged the Führer to hurry as they had Papen at a disadvantage.¹⁰

A tenuous, but none the less important, link between Himmler and the Führer at this time lay in the financier Wilhelm Keppler, described by Papen at the Nuremberg Trial as ‘a man who was always in Hitler’s entourage’. By 1932 Keppler had become one of Hitler’s closest economic advisers; he had been introduced to Hitler by Himmler, and his gratitude expressed itself later in his financial patronage of Himmler’s racial researches.¹¹ Keppler became one of the principal men responsible for maintaining relations between the Party and a widening circle of industrialists, and it was through him that the notorious meeting between Hitler and Papen took place at the house of the banker Kurt von Schroeder in Cologne, on 4 January 1933, when certain plans to bring down Schleicher’s government were discussed which were to result in Hitler becoming Chancellor at the end of the month. Himmler was a shadowy supporter on the occasion of this meeting, and later assisted in promoting the next stage of the negotiations through a newcomer to the political stage, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at whose villa in Dahlem the uneasy conferences were continued between Hitler and Papen with Keppler and Himmler still present.

Roehm, meanwhile, was taking an arbitrary line with the S.S. in Berlin, which under Daluege still managed to remain independent of Himmler in Munich. Roehm appointed his own director of training for the S.S. in his area, Friedrich Krueger, but on public occasions Roehm and Himmler appeared together in apparent harmony. Himmler was in no position to press openly for power; he was forced to play the part of the subordinate, while at the same time he studied the opportunities which the work of Heydrich and his S.D. agents were so diligently compiling. He was well satisfied with the rapid growth of the S.S. directly under his control, and with the carefully planned organization and training which had been achieved.

A description of the S.S. formations during the period 1933-4 was given before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg by von Eberstein, the man who had introduced Heydrich to Himmler; Eberstein was an ex-officer and civil servant who had joined the S.S. in 1928 and was typical of its aristocratic leanings. ‘Before 1933’, he said at Nuremberg, ‘a great number of aristocrats and members of German princely houses joined the S.S.’¹² He mentioned, for example, the Prince von Waldeck, and the Prince von Mecklenburg, and after 1932, the Prince Lippe-Biesterfeld, General Graf von Schulenburg, Archbishop Groeber of Freiburg, the Archbishop of Brunswick and the Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. When Himmler took over in 1929, there had been, according to Eberstein, only about fifty S.S. men in the district of Thuringia, where he was acting for the S.S. in Weimar, but after the seizure of power he had charge of some 15,000 S.S. men in the area covering Saxony and Thuringia. The elegant S.S. uniform attracted recruits and added to their social prestige. As Eberstein said at Nuremberg:

For Heydrich, the S.S. already represented the nucleus of a secret police once the Party came to power. As Reitlinger has pointed out, an official political police already existed in both Berlin and Munich, and when the great police purge came after 30 January many men in this secret service remained to serve the Nazis; among them for example was Heinrich Mueller, who later became head of the Gestapo before he had in fact become a Party member. Affidavits read at the Nuremberg Trial make it clear that the S.D. was well prepared with its screenings of the members of the Political Police in Munich, which was known as Department VI of the Police Organization. Most of them were immediately absorbed into the service of Himmler when he was appointed President of Police in Munich by Hitler, a very minor office compared with that given to Goring who, in addition to his Cabinet rank and Presidency of the Reichstag, became also Minister of the Interior for the state of Prussia. This appointment gave Goring charge of the police in what was by far the largest and most influential state administration in Germany. Goring immediately used his authority to place the Berlin S.S. leader, Kurt Daluege, at the head of the Prussian police, and appointed Rudolf Diels, a police official married to his cousin, Ilse Goring, as head of the section of political police that he created, the Berlin Police Bureau 1A, which was later to be renamed the Gestapo. Daluege at this stage was wholly under the influence of Goring and refused even to receive Heydrich, who went to Berlin to see him on Himmler’s behalf on 15 March. Daluege, young, bland and opportunist without either intelligence or conscience, had reached the rank of an S.S. general by the age of twenty-nine. Before joining the S.S., he had been in charge of refuse disposal for the City Engineer. Now he had to use his wits to steer his way through the conflicting currents of his superiors’ struggle for power.¹³

In the months immediately following Hitler’s Chancellorship, it was Goring, not Himmler, who was the principal activator of police control. He poured his prodigious energy into the defeat of the remnants of democracy in Germany and into the rout of the Communists, the Party’s chosen enemy in the Reichstag and in the streets. Speed was what mattered, and the use of violence and terror to break up the forces of resistance before they could realize what was happening and oppose this sudden, savage onslaught by rallying themselves to out-vote Hitler in the elections due on 5 March. Within a week the Prussian Parliament was dissolved; within a month unreliable police chiefs and civil servants alike were dismissed and replaced, and the police, both new and old, were armed; ‘a bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet’, cried Goring. To stop disorders, either real or imagined, Goring commandeered 25,000 men from the S.A. and 10,000 from the S.S. and armed them to supplement the activities of the police; the Communist leaders were arrested and their party virtually put out of action before the elections could be fought. In February, the night of the Reichstag fire, both Hitler and Goring declared that a Communist putsch had been imminent and that the fire was a beacon from heaven with which to blaze the trail of the Communist traitors. On 28 February the clauses of the constitution guaranteeing civil liberties were suspended, and anyone could be placed without trial under ‘protective custody’. At the polls the Nazis secured only a bare majority along with their allies the Nationalists, but with the Reichstag stripped of its Communist deputies Hitler was able to put through an Enabling Bill on 23 March which gave him power to govern by means of emergency decrees.

Action of this order was scarcely in Himmler’s nature. When it was decided that the Catholic Conservative government in Munich should be removed, it was the S.A. under the Ritter von Epp, the friend of Roehm, who dismissed them on 8 March. Himmler, the Bavarian President of Police, was by-passed. In the same month, Goring set up his first concentration camps in Prussia under the supervision of Diels, and in April segregated his political police in their own headquarters in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. In January they became known officially as the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Secret State Police, or Gestapo for short. This was a first significant move towards centralization in the police control of the state, and it was a warning to Himmler, whose autonomy still lay only in Bavaria.

Between April 1933 and April of the following year, Himmler took his own devious but independent line of action. Heydrich had become head of the Bavarian secret police and of the S.S. Security Office. Himmler established his own model concentration camp at Dachau, parallel with those created by Goring and others which were set up elsewhere, both semi-officially and unofficially by the S.S., the S.A. and the Nazi Gauleiters, who had been hurried into office in the various Gaue, or regions, into which Germany was divided for Nazi administration. At Nuremberg Goring claimed that he closed those unauthorized camps that came to his notice and where, he gathered, brutalities were practised. A camp founded by the S.S. near Osnabrück led to active friction between Himmler and Goring, whose investigators, led by Diels, claimed they were fired upon by the S.S. guards when they were sent to find out what was happening. Himmler was forced to close the camp on direct orders from Hitler. Göring’s intervention was largely dictated by his desire at this time to become the co-ordinator of police activities throughout Germany. That he failed was due to the persistent ambition of Himmler to improve his personal position and the desire of Roehm to merge the large forces of the S.A. into those of the regular army with himself as Supreme Commander, a situation which neither Goring nor Hitler would tolerate.

To control his camp at Dachau, Himmler established a volunteer formation of S.S. men willing to undertake long-term service as camp guards. This central formation was called the Death’s Head (Totenkopf) unit and granted the special insignia of the skull and crossbones; the officer put in command of this and other Death’s Head units was Theodor Eicke, a former Army officer and veteran of the First World War, who was one of Himmler’s most trusted adherents on racial matters. One of Eicke’s guards at Dachau was an Austrian, Adolf Eichmann; another in 1934 was Rudolf Hoess, later to take charge of extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz.

Hoess — another man, like Goebbels and Heydrich, at one time intended for the Catholic priesthood — had been a soldier during the 1914 — 18 war, and later joined the Free Corps.¹⁴ He had been involved in a brutal political murder and imprisoned for six years before becoming a Nazi after his release and joining the S.S. This extraordinary man, so dutiful and even intelligently moralizing in his attitude, wrote his memoirs in confinement after the Hitler war and explained in great detail his relations with Himmler. He had belonged to the idealistic agricultural organization called the Artamanen, a nationalist youth movement which was dedicated to the cultivation of the soil and the avoidance of city life. It was through this that he claims he first came to know Himmler, who, in June 1934 at an S.S. review in Stettin, invited him to join the staff in Dachau, where in December he held the rank of corporal in the Death’s Head Guards.

Dachau, Himmler’s experimental concentration camp, was established by an order signed by him as Police President of Munich on 21 March, and authorized by the Catholic supporter of the Nazis, Heinrich Held, the Prime Minister of Bavaria, a few days before his forcible expulsion by the S.A. The order, which appeared in the Munich Neueste Nachrichten on the day it was signed, read:

Dachau, which was situated about twelve miles north-west of Munich, became a permanent centre of sanction by the Nazis against the German people and all those whom Hitler was later to subject. In the first unbridled period of power, the seizure of men and women for interrogation, often under torture, by the S.S. and the S.A. grew out of hand, and by Christmas 1933 Hitler found it necessary to announce an amnesty for 27,000 prisoners. No one now knows how many were in fact freed, and Himmler was later to boast that he succeeded in persuading Hitler to omit any prisoners in Dachau from the amnesty.

The order for protective custody was as brief as the order establishing Dachau; it read: ‘Based on Article I of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State of February 28 1933, you are taken into protective custody in the interest of public security and order. Reason: suspicion of activities inimical to the State.’

Goring was quite open about the reason for establishing the camps: ‘We had to deal ruthlessly with these enemies of the State… Thus the Concentration Camps were created to which we had to send first thousands of functionaries of the Communist and Social Democratic parties.’ Frick was later to define protective custody as ‘a coercive measure of the Secret State Police… in order to counter all aspirations of enemies of the people and the State.’¹⁵

Goring’s barbarous vigour was one aspect of Nazi cruelty; Himmler’s attention to the details of brutality was another. Almost twenty years separate us from the full exposure of what happened in the concentration camps, and no documentation could be more complete, ranging from the testimony given by thousands of persecuted men and women who managed to survive, to the detailed witness of such men as Hoess and Eichmann, Himmler’s agents in the most fearful record of torture, destruction and despair that human history has ever compiled in such thorough and horrifying detail. While Goring as a man was no more brutal than many other oppressors in the evolutionary struggle of modern Europe, the coldly punitive administration of sadism by Himmler challenges comprehension. Yet it is necessary to understand him, not least because there will always exist human beings who, once they are given a similar power over others and have similar convictions of superiority, may be tempted to act as he did.

Himmler had learned to live and work by regulations, and on 1 November 1933, the rules governing life and death in Dachau were completed by Eicke under Himmler’s exacting direction. The legalistic phrasing, the comfortable work of men sitting at desks as Himmler so often sat, covers with a bureaucratic gloss the acts of terrorism which the careful rules incite. For example:

Himmler’s secret pursuit of power began outside Prussia, where he realized Goring was omnipotent. Roehm, watchful of the situation, realized that Himmler and Heydrich formed a powerful team and would not be content with the minor place in the Nazi state which had been allotted to them; he decided it might be wise not to alienate the leaders of the S.S. By the summer Göring’s initial energy was spent, and his pleasure-loving nature, combined with the desire to accumulate other positions of importance under Hitler, led him to slacken his control over his subordinates, who were more directly involved in the struggle for supremacy developing between the S.A., the S.S. and the Gestapo. Daluege, Göring’s Chief of Police, had by now decided to keep in touch with Munich.

Artur Nebe was the principal S.S. man among the many working in the Gestapo; Diels claims Nebe was spying on him for Heydrich, and that Karl Ernst, Roehm’s Chief of Staff of the Berlin S.A., was actually threatening his life until Roehm ordered him to desist and suggested to Diels he had better join the S.S. for his own self-protection. The opportunity to do so came after an S.S. raid on Diels’s flat had led to an open breach between Goring and Himmler, which they had the good sense to heal at a meeting in Berlin. Diels was placated with an honorary commission in the S.S. But this did not save him from having to escape in October from threatened arrest by the S.S. on an order, he claimed, issued by Goring himself. This happened after Goring had been shown evidence prepared by Heydrich of Diels’s anti-Nazi activities before his adoption by Göring.

Whether Diels was telling the truth or not, his story is important because it reveals the gradual growth in stature of Heydrich and Himmler in the eyes of the men in Berlin. Germany consisted of many semi-autonomous states both large and small, of which Bavaria, where Hitler’s Nazi faction had originated, was now second only to Prussia in importance. Himmler knew as well as Goring that Hitler wanted to unify the control of Germany, and as a reward for his supreme efficiency in Bavaria he asked the Führer to extend his powers in the remaining states of Germany. In the race to build single police-states, Goring had made a powerful initial spurt, but he lacked the staying-power to win. From October, Himmler began to gather for himself the offices of Chief of the Political Police in the remaining states of Germany, completing the process by March in the following year.¹⁷

This assimilation of special powers in the German states through acquiring the office of Commander of Political Police was illegal because Frick, the Nazi Minister of the Interior, was never consulted, in spite of the fact that the provincial governments were responsible to the Ministry of the Interior for their police administration. To cover his activities, Himmler always declared himself the servant of the provincial governments when, after parading the local S.S. formations in order to intimidate the officials, he assumed his new command on their behalf. Frick, in the face of Hitler’s policy of the gradual centralization of power, was all but helpless to defend his own rights as Minister against these obvious encroachments by Himmler into his area of responsibility. According to the anti-Nazi Gisevius, he roused himself to forbid the states to create further offices without his direct consent, but Himmler circumvented this by forcing the finance ministers of the provincial governments to subsidize his S.S. formations and the concentration camps in their area. In one way or another, Himmler built up the network of his powers until the web spread over the whole of Germany with the exception of Goring’s Prussia.

At the same time, during the autumn of 1933, Heydrich had established in Berlin, in open defiance of Goring, a section of the S.D. at premises in Eichen-Allee, and in November Gregor Strasser, who had once been Himmler’s employer, made his celebrated pun in a note sent to Hans Frank: ‘Hitler seems to be entirely in the hands of his Himmlers and Anhimmlers (adorers).’ Nevertheless, it was Roehm who received official promotion to Hitler’s Cabinet in December 1933, a step which so alarmed Goring that it made him carefully reconsider his future relationship with Himmler.

Gisevius, at that time still an official in the Gestapo, has described how he became involved in the intrigues between Daluege, Diels and Heydrich. In February 1934 he was invited, to use a polite term, to attend a conference at the barracks of the S.S. Leibstandarte in Lichterfelde along with Nebe. They went, thinking their last hour had come; to their surprise, they were greeted by Dietrich, Commandant of the Leibstandarte, with flattering messages from Himmler and Heydrich. Their stand against corruption in the Gestapo was specially commended, and they were invited to sit down there and then and write a report of their ‘grievances’, as Dietrich put it. They did so, recording many instances of ‘extortion, torture and killing’. As Gisevius puts it: ‘It was always a favourite S.S. tactic to appear in the guise of respectable citizens and to condemn vigorously all excesses, lies or infringements of the law. Himmler, when talking to a small group, sounded like the stoutest crusader for decency, cleanliness, and justice.’ Undoubtedly Himmler believed in his mission, like a strict schoolmaster, while Heydrich went on filling his files for the final assault on the citadel of Prussia.

To emphasize the need for the co-ordination of the political police under a single authority, Heydrich made use of a report from one of his agents that a Communist plot was forming, quite unknown to Goring’s Gestapo, to murder Goring. Arrests were made before either Goring or Hitler was informed, and Himmler used the plot to press the Führer to place the whole police force of Germany under the control of the S.S. After some hesitation, Hitler agreed, and with Goring’s consent the Prussian Ministry of the Interior was merged with the Reich Ministry of the Interior, and its political police, including the Gestapo, placed under Himmler as the new head of the national secret police force. To soften the transfer of power, Goring as Prime Minister of Prussia remained nominally responsible, but on 10 April he addressed the assembled Gestapo in the presence of Himmler and Heydrich, explaining to them that Himmler would in future take charge of their work as his deputy. He ordered them to support Himmler in the struggle against the enemies of the State, while Himmler in his turn protested his loyalty and gratitude in an excess of delighted subservience. ‘I shall forever remain loyal to you. Never will you have anything to fear from me’, he declared. On 20 April 1934 Himmler formally took over the Gestapo, with Heydrich as his deputy. The links in the chain of office were now complete.