Heinrich Himmler : A Life (34 page)

On 11 October 1934 Himmler made a speech to the staff of the Secret State Police Office. He used the opportunity to remind them that he had spoken to a number of members of the Gestapo at the same venue shortly after 30 June. This had been ‘the worst day that could happen to a soldier in his life’. For ‘having to shoot one’s own comrades, with whom one has stood shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for an ideal, in some cases for 8 or 10 years, and who have then let one down, is the most bitter experience that can or should happen to a person’. However, according to Himmler, 30 June had been an important test for the Gestapo.

Later on in his speech Himmler projected an image of himself as a strict but caring boss. If they had requests to make they should not put them in anonymous letters: ‘You will always find my door open if you come to me with a request which you wish to make in connection with yourself or a colleague, which has something to do with official business, or whether it’s a personal request because you have a problem as a result of a misfortune or some other mishap [ . . . ] I can put up with frankness and I will then help you or at least offer you advice in so far as it is in my power to do so.’ That also applied to financial matters. Thus, he would try his best to negotiate any fringe benefits that had been promised from the responsible authorities. Himmler also used the speech for an attack on bureaucratic methods, which, by using examples, he made to appear ridiculous. Instead, they should work with ‘military speed’. One of his demands was that all documents should be signed personally by the person responsible for them.

Finally, Himmler painted the picture of a humane secret police, a sort of service provider for internal security: ‘The nation must be convinced that the most just agency in the new state, the one that is most correct, is the feared Secret State Police. The nation must believe that if someone is pulled in he has been justly pulled in; they must believe that in all other matters, if they don’t harm the state, the members of the Secret State Police will behave in a friendly way, that they have warm hearts and an absolute sense of justice.’ He exhorted his colleagues to receive visitors ‘in a polite and friendly manner’. Nobody should be ‘bawled out’. The Gestapo people should see themselves as ‘facilitators’, not ‘dictators’. Himmler painted his colleagues the picture of an office climate that was positively idyllic: the
following months should be used to strengthen comradeship and to achieve a ‘cheerful willingness to get on with the work’. Moreover, the working day would be cut by one hour. But when necessary they must sometimes work longer. However, he was very happy to grant an extra free day at Christmas or on other occasions. He ended his speech with three ‘Sieg Heils!’
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During the first months after 30 June Himmler, who was still only deputy head of the Gestapo, was primarily concerned to achieve the maximum possible room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis his boss, Göring. Reflecting on the performance of the Gestapo during the years 1933 to the beginning of 1935 in a speech made in 1936 in the presence of Göring, Himmler criticized it as ‘unsatisfactory’,
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thereby revealing the difference in the goals of the two men. Whereas Himmler pressed for all bureaucratic obstacles and legal restrictions on the Gestapo to be removed in order to make it more efficient, after 30 June 1934 Göring was seeking ways through which he might be able to exercise some kind of control over Himmler’s activities.

In June 1934 Göring’s state secretary, Paul Körner, was still asking Himmler to provide a monthly list of all cases in which protective custody had been imposed for more than seven days. However, Himmler was dilatory in handling the request. While Göring did receive a list of protective-custody prisoners from the Gestapa in the summer of 1934 in connection with Hitler’s amnesty of 7 August, there does not appear to have been any monthly reporting of the figures.
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In October Göring made a new attempt. He issued a set of instructions for the Secret State Police in which he listed in detail what rights he reserved to himself as head of the Secret Police: the issuing of ‘general directives’, the ‘overall supervision of the agency’s work’, personnel matters involving higher-ranking officials, the framing of the budget, and not least, ‘the supervision of the Inspector’s performance and discipline’. It was particularly important that Göring insisted that these rights of supervision should be exercised by the Prussian State Ministry, in other words, by his office as Prime Minister. This would have subjected the Gestapa to effective bureaucratic control.
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Moreover, the concentration camps were subordinated to Himmler in his role as head of the Gestapo and not, as Himmler had requested in August 1934, as Reichsführer-SS, since that would have meant that Göring would have lost all state control over the camps.

Ill. 11.
On 20 April 1934 Göring appointed Himmler ‘Inspector’ of the Prussian Secret State Police Office (Gestapa). Although Göring officially retained control of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) in the largest German state, in fact Himmler was very quickly to succeed—above all as a result of the events of 30 June 1934—in evading this check on his power.

In the final analysis, however, Göring’s attempt to secure control over Himmler in his new role proved impossible. As the responsible official in the State Ministry put it: ‘We failed to subordinate the Secret State Police to its legally prescribed supervisory authority.’ The Gestapa thwarted every attempt by the state bureaucracy to control the concentration camps, by failing to respond to requests and by submitting to the budgetary authorities a demand for a lump sum instead of detailing each item of proposed expenditure. As the State Ministry had meanwhile acquired a copy of the regulations for Esterwegen concentration camp, and Göring was therefore aware of the arbitrary terror regime practised in the camp, the state authorities were faced with the problem of whether, in view of their failure to exercise de facto control, they should continue to claim the right to supervise Himmler’s empire, when this would mean, as the same official put it, that ‘the Prime Minister as well as the State Ministry’s desk official would share responsibility for the measures of the Secret State Police’.
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The result was that, only a few weeks after issuing his regulations, Göring changed tack. On 20 November 1934 he announced that in future his powers as head of the Gestapo would be exercised by Himmler. In those matters that he had reserved for himself the correspondence would be conducted under the heading ‘Prussian Secret State Police: The Deputy Chief and Inspector’. Although he informed Himmler on the same day that he reserved the right ‘to issue him with instructions in matters of fundamental importance or in individual cases’,
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this did not alter the fact that Himmler had emerged the victor in this power struggle.

As has already been mentioned, after Himmler’s and Heydrich’s takeover of the Gestapa the SD headquarters was moved back to Berlin.
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In January 1935 the SD Office (like the SS Race and Settlement Office) was raised to the status of a Main Office and divided into three departments: Administration and Organization (until 1935 under the direction of Werner Best, who then transferred to the Gestapa), Domestic Affairs (under Hermann Behrends), and Foreign Affairs (under Heinz Johst).
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During the years 1933–4 Himmler had regarded the SD primarily as an instrument with which to achieve his appointment as head of the political police departments of the federal states through internal party espionage and
the establishment of personal contacts. Now the Security Service acquired a secret-police role complementary to that of the Gestapo. The number of permanent staff had increased by the end of 1934 to 850, among them numerous graduates and members of the intelligentsia.
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The SD Domestic Affairs Department not only kept tabs on the actual and construed opponents of Nazism but also initiated systematic and comprehensive reporting on the whole of society. The Foreign Department concentrated its efforts on building up an autonomous foreign intelligence organization. During its early years the Foreign Department was still relatively small and appears to have been insignificant. One focus of its activities was the potential to utilize the Sudeten German minority for activities in Czechoslovakia.
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However, if one bears in mind the fact that in January 1934 Göring agreed with the Foreign Ministry’s proposal to ban the Gestapo from undertaking intelligence work abroad, then one can reasonably interpret these activities as an attempt to use the SD to get round this ban, which indeed could never be fully enforced.
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In fact, Himmler and Heydrich sought to achieve close links between the Gestapo and the SD. For example, Heydrich demanded that all members of the political police forces who were simultaneously members of the SS should join the SD. From 1936 onwards this was also demanded of criminal police officers. In fact the members of the SD formed a separate network within the Gestapo so that, towards the end of the 1930s, a close intermeshing of security police and SD was to emerge.
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On 4 July, immediately after the emasculation of the SA, Himmler had issued guidelines for the cooperation of the political police and the SD. According to Himmler, the SD, which had just been declared by Hess to be the sole intelligence organization of the party, was ‘to participate in the carrying out of the duties of state security and represents an important complement to those state agencies that have been assigned these tasks’. As the ‘rule for the clear separation of the spheres of operation’, Himmler laid down that the police agencies of the state should combat ‘the enemies of the Nazi state’, while the SD should ‘investigate the enemies of National Socialist values and initiate their combating and countering by the police authorities of the state’. Thus the SD was ‘banned from undertaking any executive actions’.
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In a set of ‘Joint Service Instructions for the Political Police and the SD’ from 1935 or early 1936 Himmler reasserted these principles, and insisted on close cooperation between the two organizations. Even if the SD could not take executive action, ‘as an auxiliary agency of the police’ it was still to be
provided with internal information and to have access to documents. It could request the Gestapo to carry out searches, and conversely the political police could assign it intelligence tasks.
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At the same time, limits were imposed on the extent to which the SD could pry into internal party affairs. At the end of 1935 Heydrich ordered that in future ‘investigations and the surveillance of party affairs’ were to be banned ‘throughout the Security Service’, since various SD offices, ‘particularly in small states and districts’, had ‘allowed themselves to become too involved in local affairs’ and thus had not always been in a position ‘to report objectively on alleged or actual irregularities within party agencies’.
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However, the message for the SD, which had begun its life as a party intelligence agency, was clear: it must now concentrate above all on its new sphere of operations.

Although there were tensions between the SS and the Reichswehr concerning the SS’s armed units, during 1935 and 1936 Himmler and Heydrich were able to win the support of the army leadership for expanding the role of the Gestapo. When the Gestapa was set up it had also taken over the responsibility for combating civil espionage that had hitherto lain with the political police. The fact that the Gestapo now began to increase its activities in this area initially led to disagreements and conflict with military intelligence. At the end of 1934 relations between the Gestapo and the Reichswehr had reached a low point. Himmler, Göring, and Heydrich launched rumours to the effect that the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Werner von Fritsch, was planning a coup. In order to reduce the tension, on 3 January Hitler made a public declaration of loyalty to the army and, on 13 January, Himmler himself gave a speech to senior officers outlining the role of the SS with the aim of restoring confidence.
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At the beginning of 1935 the situation was also eased by the fact that military intelligence acquired a new head in the shape of Wilhelm Canaris, an acquaintance of Heydrich’s. Unlike his predecessor, Conrad Patzig, who was an opponent of the SS, Canaris was relatively open to collaboration with the Gestapa.
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As early as 17 January Heydrich and Canaris had made a written agreement demarcating the responsibilities between military intelligence and ‘police intelligence’. These so-called ‘ten commandments’ laid
down that the Gestapo would be responsible for counter-intelligence work in armament factories, frontier protection, and policing foreigners; the Gestapo then organized a separate frontier police force. Heydrich also reorganized Department III of the Gestapa, which was responsible for counter-intelligence, to take account of its new responsibilities. In the spring of 1935 he removed the section responsible for foreign intelligence from the department and assigned it to the department responsible for combating internal enemies, under an innocuous-sounding title. This avoided disputes over competencies with military intelligence and ensured that Göring’s order that the Gestapo should not conduct espionage appeared to be being adhered to. At the beginning of 1936 Heydrich appointed his new head of organization, Werner Best, who was able to establish good relations with Canaris, to head up Department III.
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