Army of Evil: A History of the SS (14 page)

Then, during the evening of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag was set on fire. Arriving at the scene, the Berlin Police managed to apprehend the arsonist, who was running around, shirtless, inside the building. He was a twenty-four-year-old Dutch leftist, Marinus van der Lubbe.
*
There has been much speculation over the years that the National Socialists themselves orchestrated this attack, but it now seems that it came as a complete surprise to them.
¹⁵
They may even have believed that it presaged the start of an actual left-wing revolution. However, van der Lubbe seems to have acted entirely alone, motivated by fury about the National Socialists’ rise to power and the subsequent inactivity of the German Communist Party. Unsurprisingly, the National Socialists immediately branded him an agent of a left-wing conspiracy, while the Communists portrayed him as a deranged tool of the NSDAP.
¹⁶
Most ordinary people simply did not know what to believe.

Irrespective of what motivated van der Lubbe, his attack had an immediate, ominous consequence: the so-called “Reichstag Fire Decree,” promulgated on 28 February after hurried discussions, which effectively ended civil liberty within Germany.
Habeas corpus
was suspended, as were freedom of the person, freedom of expression, freedom of association and assembly, confidentiality of post and telecommunication, and the right to protect one’s home and property.
¹⁷
This was originally formulated at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior
and was to be applied only in Prussia, but the national Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, soon came up with a version to be enforced nationwide. It was passed by Hitler’s cabinet and signed into law the same day by Hindenburg. By now, though, the President was descending into senile dementia, beset by ill-health and largely under the control of his son Oskar.

A wave of anti-opposition terror was legitimised by the decree, and it was a pivotal piece of legislation in facilitating the creation of what later became the National Socialist security state. Critically, it separated the judiciary from the exercise of the power of detention: suspects could now be rounded up by agents of the state, including the newly formed auxiliaries, and detained without any legal scrutiny of the case against them. Consequently, worried friends and relations often had no idea why an individual had been detained, nor even where they were being held.

In Weimar Germany’s last free elections, in November 1932, the Social Democrats and the Communists had received a fraction under 38 per cent of the vote, with the Communists accounting for 16.9 per cent of this. Just over four months later, with Hitler and the NSDAP in control of the machinery of government and many elements of state security, the majority of Communist leaders and deputies were either under arrest or had fled the country. In Goering’s Prussia, ten thousand Communists and sympathisers were arrested in the week leading up to the 5 March election. By the end of the month, some twenty-five thousand Communists were either in prison or in one of several hastily set-up concentration camps.
¹⁸
By the summer, more than a hundred thousand Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and other opponents of the NSDAP had been arrested. A conservative official estimate suggests that at least six hundred of them died in captivity.
¹⁹

The National Socialists won the election with 43.9 per cent of the vote, an increase of 10 percentage points since November. This did not give the NSDAP the overall majority that Hitler had wanted and predicted, but it meant it could form a coalition government with just one
other party—the conservative-nationalist German National People’s Party. In spite of the oppression that had been directed at the Communist Party, it still managed to poll more than 12 per cent of the vote, which entitled it to eighty-one deputies. But with its leaders in custody, hiding or exile, there were a lot of empty seats in the Reichstag. The scene was now set for the government to seek the votes of the Catholic Centrum Party and gain the necessary two-thirds majority to pass an Enabling Act.
²⁰
This duly happened on 23 March, when the newly elected Reichstag convened. With a series of Hitler’s empty promises ringing in their ears, the Centrum deputies voted with the government and brought Weimar democracy to an end.
²¹
Effectively, Hitler’s word was now law. Meanwhile, the increasingly frail Hindenburg announced that he would be withdrawing from the day-to-day affairs of government, and would not normally need to be consulted on legislation passed under the Enabling Act.

On 27 March, Hitler appointed Franz Ritter von Epp, one of his longest-serving collaborators, as
Reichskommissar
(Governor) of Bavaria, which opened the way for Himmler to become the new police chief of Munich. Himmler immediately installed Heydrich as head of the force’s “political desk,”
²²
which effectively put him in charge of surveillance of potential enemies of the Bavarian state.

Himmler’s position in Munich was strengthened on 1 April when he became a special adviser to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and was appointed Commander of the statewide Bavarian political police. Again, Heydrich rose with him, becoming Himmler’s executive deputy, and set about reorganising the Bavarian political police. Hitherto, this had been a branch of the general police service, but Heydrich made it an entirely separate body, free from any administrative ties to the mainstream police, yet still able to use the latter’s resources, if needed. At first, most of the manpower came from the existing Bavarian political police, but this was supplemented by members of Heydrich’s Intelligence Service—now renamed the
Sicherheitsdienst
(SD—Security Service)—which he had been gradually building up
over the past two years. Importantly, one of Himmler’s new responsibilities was to assume control of the concentration camps that had been set up in the wake of the Reichstag fire. He closed down the existing camps in Bavaria, and replaced them with one, centralised camp in the Munich suburb of Dachau. Command of this camp was put in the hands of SS-Battalion Leader Hilmar Wäckerle, an early National Socialist who had been a student with Himmler in Munich.
²³

Circumstances gave Himmler an ally in his quest to expand and consolidate his power base from the Bavarian political police in the shape of Minister of the Interior Frick. Prior to the National Socialist takeover, many of the powers of government within Germany, including the police forces, were in the hands of the individual
Länder
(states—such as Bavaria and Saxony). But in March and April 1933, Frick introduced a series of decrees that redefined the relationship between central government and the states, established the primacy of central government and vested ultimate local authority in “Reich Governors”—who were tasked with ensuring that their states observed “the political principles laid down by the Reich Chancellor.”
²⁴
He also began to work towards converting the provincial police forces into a unified, national force under the Ministry of the Interior. However, these plans were opposed by Frick’s National Socialist cabinet colleague, Goering, who exercised
de facto
control over more than half of Germany’s police, first in his role as Prussian Interior Minister and then as Minister-President of Prussia.

Somewhat disturbed by the violence that he had unleashed in the wake of the Reichstag fire, Goering called upon the help of a small, obscure section within the Prussian police headquarters, section IA—the Prussian political police. This was the closest thing Germany had to a national political intelligence clearinghouse. Goering appointed Dr. Rudolf Diels, a lawyer and professional civil servant who had been working as head of the political police in Berlin, to lead IA. Diels was a fellow traveller rather than an ideologically committed National Socialist, but he was prepared to work with Goering to create a Prussian
political police force similar to the one being set up by Himmler and Heydrich in Bavaria. It would be used as an executive instrument of the state to suppress the National Socialists’ political enemies, both outside and inside the NSDAP. Diels recruited detectives from the criminal branches of the mainstream police, while Goering put in place the legal framework that would enable them to operate unfettered. Primarily, he allowed the force to arrest and detain suspects on their own authority, without any judicial oversight. At the end of April, Diels’ section was officially renamed the
Geheime Staatspolizeiamt
(Secret State Police Office) and made an independent police authority responsible only to the Minister-President of Prussia—that is, Goering himself. The new organisation was officially abbreviated to “Gestapa,” but in popular slang it was given the better-known sobriquet “Gestapo.” Before long, it had set up its offices in a former arts and crafts school on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in central Berlin.
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Diels began to exercise his new powers to bring order back to Prussia by clamping down on the excesses of the SA. A major part of the problem was that the auxiliaries mobilised by Goering after the Reichstag Fire Decree owed their primary loyalty to their SA (or SS) commanders, not to him, so setting them in motion actually reduced rather than enhanced his power to influence events. Diels used his expanded force to collect intelligence on SA activities and, where necessary, curtail them. In a series of raids, his men swooped on SA-run “illegal” concentration camps, released the inmates and arrested the gaolers.

Having reasserted his authority in Prussia through the Gestapo, Goering was not inclined to hand control of his police forces over to Frick at the Ministry of the Interior, so a political standoff developed between the two men. Frick needed an ally to overcome Goring’s resistance to a national police force, and the obvious candidate was Himmler. So, between November 1933 and January 1934, Frick helped manoeuvre Himmler into command of every state-level political police force, save for Prussia’s.

Initially, Goering fought back by increasing his personal control
over the Gestapo, in order to prevent a Himmler takeover there as well. But he soon accepted that this battle was not worth fighting—primarily because he was facing a greater threat. Instead, he decided that a new tactical political alliance was in order. In April 1934, he appointed Himmler as “Inspector”
*
of the Prussian Gestapo, which finally sealed Himmler’s control over all of Germany’s political police forces. Heydrich, as ever following on the coat-tails of his boss, became the operational chief of the Gestapo.

A little later, in November 1934, Daluege, who was still head of the Prussian uniformed police, had his authority extended throughout Germany. This came about when the Prussian Ministry of the Interior was combined with the national ministry, creating a united police department for the whole country. Meanwhile, Arthur Nebe, a long-time National Socialist and member of the SS who had been serving as executive head of the Gestapo, was appointed chief of the Prussian
Kriminalpolizei
(Kripo—Criminal Detective Branch).

Officially, these men had been appointed by the national Interior Ministry, the Prussian government, or one of the smaller state governments, so in theory they owed allegiance to one of those institutions. In practice, in under two years, the SS had assumed effective control over the entire German police force.
²⁶

*
Broadly speaking, “intelligence” is information that is gathered and analysed before informing decisions. Without the crucial analysis step—or at least being put in some kind of context—it is of little or no value.

†
This followed the German general staff system, in which “Ia” was the chief operations officer, “Ib” the chief logistics officer and “Ic” the chief intelligence officer.

*
In 1940, Hitler’s government funded a notorious anti-Semitic propaganda film called
Jud Süss
(
Jew Süss
), which was a remake of a 1933 British film of the same title (although the original film was far more sympathetic to the eponymous character).

*
Van der Lubbe had been a member of the Dutch Communist Party, but had broken with them and joined the Council Communists, who espoused a form of syndicalism.

*
Inspekteur
—an appointment implying responsibility for the proper conduct of training, administration and operations, without direct operational command.