Heinrich Himmler : A Life (144 page)

12
. BAB, NS 19/4004, Tag der Deutschen Polizei, 16 January 1937. Heydrich made similar comments in the
Völkischer Beobachter
of 15 January 1937 (‘Zum Tag der Deutschen Polizei’), where he wrote the police need people to ‘offer to help’ in order ‘to secure the existence and the strength of the nation against all threats and all attacks’.

13
. BAB, NS 19/4003, speech at the celebration of the summer solstice on the Brocken, 22 May 1936.

14
. On the history of the Gestapo see Holger Berschel,
Bürokratie und Terror. Das Judenreferat der Gestapo Düsseldorf 1933–1945
(Essen, 2001); Browder,
Enforcers
; id.
Foundations
; Wolfgang Dierker,
Himmlers Glaubenskrieger. Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik 1933–1941
(Paderborn, etc., 2002); Robert Gellately,
Die Gestapo und die deutsche Gesellschaft. Die Durchsetzung der Rassenpolitik 1933–1945
(Paderborn, etc., 1993); id.,
Hingeschaut
; Eric A. Johnson,
Der nationalsozialistische Terror. Gestapo, Juden und gewöhnliche Deutsche
(Berlin, 2001); Paul and Mallmann (eds),
Gestapo
; Reinhard Mann,
Protest und Kontrolle im Dritten Reich. Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft im Alltag einer rheinischen Groβ-stadt
(Frankfurt a. M., etc., 1987); Stolle,
Geheime Staatspolizei
; Wildt,
Generation
(on the Gestapo in this period see 214–62).

15
. Mann,
Protest
, 292. Other police authorities, administrative agencies, businesses, or Nazi organizations were responsible for initiating 33 per cent of the investigations, 13 per cent were the result of interrogations. There was, however, a selective procedure according to which some categories of case (e.g. investigations of Jews) were not represented and others (e.g. investigations of communists) are under-represented.

16
. Johnson,
Terror
, 392 ff.

17
. Burkhard Jellonnek, ‘Staatspolizeiliche Fahndungs- und Ermittlungsmethoden gegen Homosexuelle. Regionale Differenzen und Gemeinsamkeiten’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds),
Die Gestapo. Mythos und Realität
(Darmstadt, 1995), 343–56, here 350, notes a figure of 87.5 per cent for denunciations in cases of malicious statements (
Heimtücke
) for the Saarbrücken Gestapo office; according to Johnson,
Terror
, denunciations of Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and those subject to political persecution were relatively infrequent (pp. 251, 269, 312 ff., and 393). Robert Gellately
notes in his study of the Würzburg Gestapo that 54 per cent of all cases of ‘racial disgrace’ (sexual relations of ‘Aryans’ with Jews) and 59 per cent of all cases which involved too close contact with Jews derived from denunciations by the population; 24 per cent and 7 per cent respectively derived from interrogations, 7 and 14 per cent respectively derived from information from other organizations (
Gestapo
, 162). For a distribution pattern of denunciations for the individual categories see Stolle,
Geheime Staatspolizei
, 252 ff.

18
. Johnson,
Terror
, 392 ff.

19
. Elisabeth Kohlhaas, ‘Die Mitarbeiter der regionalen Staatspolizeistellen. Quantitative und qualitative Befunde zur Personalausstattung der Gestapo’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds),
Die Gestapo. Mythos und Realität
(Darmstadt, 1995), 219–35, 221 ff. There are figures for January 1934 and June 1935 in GStA, Rep 90 P 13, H. 2, and Rep 90 P 14, H. 1; BAB, R 58/610, contains the results of a questionnaire ‘Personnel complement of the Stapo offices and Stapo regional offices on 31 March 1937’.

20
. Kohlhaas, ‘Mitarbeiter’, 227; Browder,
Foundations
, 56, on those who came in from outside.

21
. BAB, R 58/610, figures for 31 March 1937. The actual strength is given, the number of posts planned for is usually somewhat higher. Stapo offices, which also had to watch over sections of the frontier, were invariably better staffed; thus the Köstlin office had 86 officers, although the district had a population of only about 700,000. See Kohlhaas, ‘Mitarbeiter’, 226 f.

22
. Walter Otto Weyrauch,
Gestapo V-Leute. Tatsachen und Theorie des Geheimdienstes. Untersuchungen zur Geheimen Staatspolizei während der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft
(Frankfurt a. M., 1989). According to Weyrauch the Frankfurt Stapo had a list of 1,200 informal agents (p. 11); see also Kaus-Michael Mallmann, ‘Die V-Leute der Gestapo. Umrisse einer kollektiven Biographie’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds),
Die Gestapo. Mythos und Realität
(Darmstadt, 1995), 268–87.

23
. Circular edict of the RFSSuChdDtPol, 15 February 1938, in
RMBliV
1938, cols. 285 ff.

24
. On the SD after 1926 see Browder,
Enforcers
, 210 ff.; Wildt,
Generation
, 378 ff.; and Michael Wildt (ed.),
Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938. Eine Dokumentation
(Munich, 1995).

25
. Wildt (ed.),
Die Judenpolitik
, 27.

26
. BAB, R 58/239.

27
. Aronson,
Heydrich
, 212 f. Reinhard Höhn, head of Central Department II 1, became a professor of law at Berlin University in 1935 and had to leave the SD in 1937 (Wildt,
Generation
, 378 f.); Franz Six, head of Department II (Inland) in the SD Main Office, who was an expert on the press, became a lecturer in Königsberg in 1937 and a full professor and Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Berlin University in 1940 (Lutz Hachmeister,
Der Gegnerforscher. Die Karriere des SS-Führers Franz Alfred Six
(Munich, 1998)); before joining the SD
Otto Ohlendorf had worked at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Hanno Sowade, ‘Otto Ohlendorf—Nonkonformist, SS-Führer und Wirtschaftsfunktionär’, in Ronald Smelser and Rainer Zitelmann (eds),
Die braune Elite. 22 biographische Skizzen
(Darmstadt, 1989), 188–200); the Germanist Hans Rössner, who was an employee in the SD Culture Group, appears to have been considered for a chair at Strasbourg in 1941 (Wildt,
Generation
, 386 ff.); his predecessor, Wilhelm Spengler, also a Germanist, established the ‘Literature Office’ (Schrifttumsstelle) at the German Book Centre (Deutsche Bücherei) in Leipzig, which systematically scrutinized the output of German publishers (ibid. 174 ff.). The physician Gustav Scheel, who had a dual career in the SD und the NS Student League (he became Reich Student Leader in 1936), played an important role in recruiting young academics for the SD (ibid. 172 ff.); according to his own testimony, Walter Schellenberg, who later became head of the SD Foreign Department, was put in contact with the SD by his university tutor (George C. Browder, ‘Schellenberg—Eine Geheimdienst-Phantasie’, in Ronald Smelser and Enrico Syring (eds),
Die SS. Elite unter dem Totenkopf. 30 Lebensläufe
(Paderborn, etc., 2000), 418–30).

28
. Mann,
Protest
, 180.

29
. Johnson,
Terror
, 305 ff.

30
. Duhnke,
KPD
, 194; Stolle,
Geheime Staatspolizei
, 222 f.; Johnson,
Terror
, 191 ff., discovered that around 70 per cent of the Krefeld Gestapo files for 1933 and 1934 dealt with communists; after the beginning of 1935 the number declined.

31
. Gestapa, ‘Lagebericht für 1937’, published in Margot Pikarski und Elke Warning (eds),
Gestapo-Berichte über den antifaschistischen Widerstandskampf der KPD 1933–1939
, vol. 1:
Anfang 1933 bis August 1939
(Berlin, 1989), doc. no. 16; Duhnke,
KPD
, 201.

32
. BAB, NS 19/4004, speech at the Gruppenführer meeting in Munich in the officers’ quarters of the SS-Standarte Deutschland, 8 November 1937. In a similar way in his speech to Wehrmacht officers in January 1937 he defended the policy he had pursued in Bavaria of not letting communist functionaries go free: doc. PS-1992 (A), in
IMT
, vol. 29, pp. 206 ff., here 217.

33
. Thus in his address to Gestapo officials and employees on 11 October 1934 he placed the blame for the ‘corruption’ of the SA leadership on the Jews, the Freemasons, and Ultramontanism (BAB, NS 19/4002); on 5 March 1935 he told Prussian state councillors that, apart from the Jews and Bolshevism, the Gestapo was focusing its efforts on ‘jewified world Freemasonry’ (ibid.); in January 1937 he announced at a course on national politics run by the Wehrmacht that he considered that ‘Bolshevism led by Jews and Freemasons’ to be the main enemy (doc. PS-1992 [A], in
IMT
, vol. 29, pp. 206 ff., quotation 229), and he explained to SS-Gruppenführer on 8 November 1938 that they were dealing with a ‘war being fought by all the Jews, Freemasons, Marxists, and Churches in the world’ against Nazi Germany (NS 19/4005, published in
Heinrich Himmler,
Geheimreden 1933–1945
, ed. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Munich, 1974), 25 ff., quotation 37).

34
.
Das Schwarze Korps
, 15 May 1935; on this series see also above pp. 196 ff.

35
. Neuberger,
Freimaurerei
, ii. 16 ff.

36
. Ibid. 101 f.

37
. Ibid. 119 f.

38
. Ibid. 23 f.

39
. BAB, NS 19/1720, RFSS to a Frau Käthe Oswald, 25 August 1932.

40
. Neuberger,
Freimaurerei
, ii. 45 f. and 108.

41
. Wildt (ed.),
Judenpolitik
, 27.

42
. BAB, R 58/239; on this order of Heydrich’s concerning the demarcation of the responsibilities of the SD and the Gestapo see p. 188 above.

43
. In January 1935 he told SS leaders in Breslau, that they were involved in a ‘struggle with those who have been the oldest opponents of our nation for thousands of years, with Jews, Freemasons and Jesuits’ (BAB, NS 19/40029, 19 January 1935, meeting of leaders of SS-Oberabschnitt South-East in Breslau, published in Himmler,
Geheimreden
, 57). In January 1937 he talked to Wehrmacht officers about ‘our natural opponents, international Bolshevism led by Jews and Freemasons’ (doc. PS-1992 [A], in
IMT
, vol. 29, pp. 206 ff., quotation 229), and he told Napola heads in July 1938, that they had ranged against them the whole of capital, all the Jews, all Freemasons, all the democrats and philistines, all the Bolshevists in the world, all the Jesuits in the world, and last but not least all the nations who regret that they did not kill the lot of us in 1918’ (BAB, NS 19/4005, speech in the Ahrenshoop tent camp, 3 July 1938, published in Himmler,
Geheimreden
, 57 f.).

44
. From summer 1933 onwards the Gestapo offices reported on Jewish organizations; in the summer of 1934 they received instructions to report on all areas of public life in which Jews and non-Jews cooperated (Berschel,
Bürokratie
, 171).

45
. Ibid. 275 ff.; BAB, R 58/269, edicts of 28 January und 6 March 1935.

46
. BAB, R 58/276, 10 February 1935 (published in Joseph Walk (ed.),
Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat. Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Maβnahmen und Richtlinien. Inhalt und Bedeutung
, 2nd edn. (Heidelberg, 1996), i, 514).

47
. Ibid. i. 516, 12 February 1935.

48
. Circular edict of 27 July 1936 re: regulations for the implementation of the Law concerning Public Houses in
RMBliV
1936, col. 1067; Uwe Dietrich Adam,
Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich
(Düsseldorf, 1972), 155.

49
. Uwe Dietrich Adam,
Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich
, 156 and 169 ff. It was only in January 1938 that the law concerning the alteration of surnames and first names was issued. The decree to implement it contained a list of first names that Jews were no longer allowed to use.

50
. BAB, R 58/23a, 7 July 1936.

51
. OA Moscow, 501-1-18, Gestapa Berlin, II 1 B 2, published in Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel (eds),
Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945
(Düsseldorf, 2004), doc. no. 447.

52
. On 17 August 1935 the Gestapa, ordered the Stapo offices to start keeping a list of members of Jewish organizations; but during the coming months those Jews who were not members of organizations were also registered. A national register was started in Gestapo headquarters. Further measures to register German Jews were the identity-card decree of 23 July 1938 and the national census of May 1939, in which a statement of racial identity was required (details in Adam,
Judenpolitik
, 182 ff.).