Heinrich Himmler : A Life (31 page)

But, in the final analysis, what was to prove decisive for Himmler’s success in Prussia was the power struggle between Göring and Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick.
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While Göring reorganized the Prussian police, Himmler had managed to some extent to infiltrate the political police (Gestapo) in what was the largest German state. It was a force that was in the process of being created but had already acquired an autonomous status. At the same time, Frick was making considerable efforts to unify the whole police structure throughout the Reich and establish a national police headquarters to include the political police. Under his scheme it was unclear how much authority over the police the federal states would retain, and it was precisely this question that was the subject of negotiation between Frick and Göring in the spring and summer of 1933.

In fact, the planned amalgamation of the Reich and Prussian Interior Ministries provided Frick with a new opportunity to bring the Gestapo under his control.
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Göring tried to prevent this from happening with the Second Gestapo Law of 30 November 1933, by removing the Gestapo from the control of the Prussian Interior Ministry, of which he was the acting head, and subordinating it to himself in his role as Prussian Prime Minister.
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As a result, Diels, who now received the title of Inspector of the Gestapo, became the head of an agency that was not only (as a result of the law of April 1933) detached from the general police organization but was no longer subject to the authority of a departmental minister. Moreover, in March 1934 Göring completely removed the regional Gestapo offices from the rest of the police organization in Prussia.
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The substantial autonomy attained by the political police in what was the largest German state, and the fact that it was no longer subject to effective control, must have encouraged the ambitious Himmler to regard it as an ideal base for his future operations. Göring was to prove the key to achieving his goal.

As early as the end of 1933 Himmler had begun to distance himself from his nominal superior, Röhm, and to move closer to Göring. At the beginning of 1934 he began to acquire compromising material on Diels from various sources, including Ludwig Grauert, the state secretary in the Prussian Interior Ministry, and Diels’s colleague Hans Gisevius, but also from Nazi figures within the police apparatus (Daluege and Artur Nebe, an
official within the Gestapa), as well as from the Berlin SD-Oberabschnitt East which had been reactivated under Heydrich’s close associate Hermann Behrends.
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While a few weeks earlier Himmler had supported Diels against Göring, he now plotted to remove the Gestapo chief.

In April 1934 Frick and Göring finally reached a compromise: Frick took over the Prussian Interior Ministry in addition to his role as Reich Interior Minister, thereby taking control of by far the largest police organization in the Reich (which was still headed by Daluege). He now sought to take over all the police forces in the rest of the Reich, which was liable to bring him into a direct confrontation with Himmler.

From the beginning of 1934 Frick and Göring had been trying to reduce the use of protective custody.
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Among other things, they had used a meeting of the Reich Governors in March to try to achieve this.
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In response, the Reich Governor of Bavaria, von Epp, and its Minister of Justice, Hans Frank, had taken further steps to cut down on protective custody but had met with opposition from the Interior Minister, Adolf Wagner, who supported Himmler.
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In April Göring and Frick reached agreement on the introduction of uniform regulations for the use of protective custody.
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Frick’s directive implementing the agreement stated that the imposition of protective custody was the responsibility of the ‘highest state authority’ (that is, the Prussian Gestapa or the Bavarian political police). This meant that nobody could be taken into protective custody in Prussia without Göring’s approval.

After this decisive safeguard had been put in place, both Frick and Göring believed they could risk handing over the political police throughout the Reich, including Prussia, to Himmler. It was not intended that Himmler should amalgamate the political police departments of the various states into a single organization, but rather that he should act as their combined leader. In this way it was assumed that his political position could be reduced to an acceptable level. This was, of course, a very formalistic approach, and it would not take Himmler long to transform his personal position of leadership into a real power base. Göring had insisted that Himmler should submit to him all important incoming and outgoing correspondence. But this turned out to be an inadequate means of controlling him, despite Himmler’s eager promise to fulfil the request. It was naive to believe that Himmler could be appointed to a position of authority with a suitable organization at his command and then somehow be effectively supervised from outside.
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Thus Himmler’s success in Prussia, which was to smooth his path to the takeover of the political police throughout the Reich, was due in part to his tactic of infiltration and of integrating key figures into the SS, in part to his diplomatic skills and his correct assessment of the interests and weaknesses of his opponents, in part to his ability to appear to subordinate himself to Göring, and, last but not least, to the fact that he did not reveal any further ambitions as far as the police were concerned. It appears that Himmler was trusted to provide the necessary coordination of the various police forces without using this function as a springboard to an unlimited expansion of his power.

All in all, Himmler had cleverly succeeded in utilizing the power struggles of his rivals for his own ends. The decisive factor was the threat the SA had either appeared to, or actually did, pose and which prompted Frick and Göring to end their dispute and include Himmler in their compromise settlement by granting him what appeared to be an appropriate post. An additional point was the fact that the leading Nazi politicians in the states preferred to see the political police in Himmler’s hands rather than in Frick’s, who, it was believed, would centralize it and integrate it once more into the general police organization in the form of a Reich political police force.

On 10 April 1934 Himmler was appointed ‘Inspector of the Secret State Police in Prussia’. The intention was that Heydrich, acting as Himmler’s deputy, should take over as head of the Secret Political Police Office (Gestapa), while Göring continued to remain officially head of the Secret State Police (Gestapo).
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While Himmler was focusing on securing his appointment as head of the political police departments of the federal states, he found himself confronted by a serious challenge created by the rapid expansion of the SS following the Nazi takeover of power. New members had poured into the SS in the weeks after 30 January 1933. In the spring of 1933 the number of SS members had already increased to 100,000, and after a temporary ban on the admission of new members between April and November 1933, the organization had more than doubled in size by the spring of the following year. Himmler later described this expansion as the ‘most serious crisis that the SS has ever experienced’; it took three or four years to sort out the negative repercussions.
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By 1935, according to his calculations, 60,000 members of the SS had had to be excluded.
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However, the number of sponsoring members or patrons also increased rapidly: from 13,217 to 167,272. These ‘sponsors’ (
fördernde Mitglieder
[
FM
]) were effectively honorary members, usually well-off individuals who paid regular contributions to the SS either out of sympathy or under intimidation. During the following year it had grown to 342,492, although subsequently there was a slight reduction, in particular on account of the ban on meetings issued in June 1934, which also banned the recruitment of patrons. Although the SS was financing itself predominantly from party subsidies (in reality taxes) by 1934 at the latest, the ‘FM’ funds’ represented a significant sum. They increased from 204,000 Reich marks in 1932 to RM 4,285,000 in 1933 and RM 6,972,000 in 1934.
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In May 1933 Himmler had moved his command staff from Munich to Berlin. During these months the number of Standarten was doubled from 50 to 100; in the winter of 1933–4 Himmler introduced Oberabschnitte or regions, which replaced the previous combination of SS-Abschnitte (districts) into Gruppen (groups). The fact that in February 1934 Himmler moved his staff back to Munich
¹¹⁹
indicates what a turbulent life the Reichsführer-SS was leading during these months. On his return to Munich he restructured the SS headquarters, which in future consisted of three agencies: the SS Office (
Amt
) for general management, the SD Office, and the Race and Settlement Office, as well as his personal staff.
¹²⁰

It was also in February 1934 that Himmler appointed Oswald Pohl, a former naval paymaster born in 1892, as the new head of the SS administration. Himmler had been seeking a reliable and experienced administrator. Pohl’s two predecessors, Paul Weickert and Gerhard Schneider, had been dismissed for embezzlement and excluded from the SS. Since the SS (as part of the SA) was receiving public subsidies from 1933 onwards and had to account for the use of this money, Himmler needed an expert who was familiar with the budgetary regulations of the public sector.
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Himmler had discussed with Pohl the possibility of his joining the SS leadership for the first time in May 1933 in Kiel. Two days after this meeting Pohl wrote Himmler a letter in which he explained his reasons for contemplating a change of career. According to Pohl, while he enjoyed being in the Navy, ‘my professional life does not provide me with intellectual satisfaction or an outlet for my creative urges and my mania for work. I want to work and I can work until I collapse.’
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Himmler liked him, and after a long interval, which was caused by the formalities of Pohl’s departure from
the Navy, on 12 February he appointed him head of Department IV (Administration) in the SS Office, backdated to 1 February.
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When Himmler took over the Prussian Gestapa in April 1934 he once again moved back to Berlin from Munich, taking Heydrich with him. The SS leadership then gradually followed and took up residence in the Prince Albrecht Palace. This building was to become the synonym for the secret police of the Nazi state.
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The foundations for the terror system had been laid.

Himmler had understood how to utilize the complicated and tense domestic political situation that existed in 1933–4 to secure control of the political police departments of the federal states. It was his services in the violent ‘resolution’ of this tangled situation that were to create the conditions for enabling the Reichsführer-SS to achieve a central position of power within the Nazi regime that was neither constantly challenged nor limited by other major Nazi figures.

Given the opaque domestic political constellation that existed at the time, the prehistory of 30 June is a complex one. It can briefly be summarized as follows: broadly speaking, there was a mood of discontent in the country. A year after the takeover of power the economic crisis had still not been solved: only about a third of the 6 million unemployed had found work. The results of the first elections to the ‘Councils of Trust’ in the factories had been so bad for the Nazis that they were never published. There was disappointment among the rural population because the inheritance law that had been introduced, with its regulations restricting the transfer of farms, had limited the opportunities for accessing credit, while the new marketing system introduced under the auspices of the ‘Reich Food Estate’, with its prescribed prices and compulsory measures, was felt to be unjust. Both Catholics and Protestants were disturbed by the regime’s religious policies, and the ‘bossy’ behaviour of party functionaries was prompting an increasing number of complaints. There was not much left of the mood of optimism about a new start that had gripped a section of the population in 1933.
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Against the background of this tense situation the SA represented an additional dangerous source of discontent.
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In the middle of 1934 the Nazi
Party’s army consisted of around 4.5 million members, approximately nine times as many as there had been in January 1933. This huge increase was not only the result of the influx of new members after the seizure of power, but also, and above all, a consequence of the incorporation of right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the Stahlhelm.

Relying on this huge, albeit heterogeneous and relatively undisciplined, force, the SA leadership under Röhm now endeavoured to secure its own share of the Nazi state. It had at least managed to achieve the appointment of SA commissars to the state machine, to begin the arming of sections of the SA, as well as to secure the state financing of SA staffs. On 1 December 1933 Röhm had been appointed a Reich minister. However, despite these successes it was still unclear how this emerging SA empire was to be integrated into the new Nazi state. The SA leadership combined this unresolved claim to power with repeated and threatening demands for a ‘second revolution’. During 1933–4 the rowdy behaviour of the SA, its numerous acts of violence and infringements of the law, which now that political opponents had been suppressed were directed mainly against the general public, were increasingly becoming a public nuisance and underlined the storm-troopers’ aggressive potential.

Above all, however, Röhm posed a threat to the Reichswehr’s role as the organization primarily responsible for the defence of the Reich. While initially there had been agreement between the Reichswehr and the SA that the latter would concentrate mainly on pre-military training and strengthening frontier defences, the SA leadership soon began planning to create an armed militia which, had these plans been realized, would have reduced the Reichswehr to a mere training organization within an SA people’s army.