Heinrich Himmler : A Life (35 page)

The agreement with Canaris also dealt with the role the SD was to play in counter-intelligence. It was now to be specifically responsible for ‘intelligence cooperation’ in the securing of armaments factories and in frontier intelligence activities, though without having executive powers; in other words, for the recruitment of informants. This was the first time that the SD had been recognized by an important state agency.
³⁷

While the SD was to derive profit from this cooperation in the long run, the Gestapo benefited immediately from working together with the Reichswehr. As early as January 1935 the Reichswehr Minister, Werner von Blomberg, sent a copy of the ‘ten commandments’ to the Reich Finance Minister with a request for financial support for the Gestapo’s counter-intelligence work; his request was approved. Moreover, he asked Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, to unify the Reich’s counter-intelligence police operations. In July he described his ideas in more detail to Hitler: it was not simply a matter of ‘creating a unified organization and direction for the political police in the Reich with official status with which the Reichswehr can deal and work’, but of establishing a ‘Reich political police force’. In this way Himmler had acquired an ally for his plan to create an official institution which could absorb the responsibility for the political forces of the federal states that had hitherto been simply embodied in his person.
³⁸

In December 1936 Canaris and Best reached a further agreement in the form of an extension to the ‘ten commandments’. Among other things, this established the priority for military over civilian counter-intelligence, which represented a significant concession by the Gestapo to the armed forces.
³⁹

Even after Himmler’s takeover of the Gestapa, Frick continued to try to restrict the arbitrary handling of protective custody. In a letter to the Bavarian state government of 30 January 1935 the Reich Interior Minister complained about the large number of prisoners in protective custody in Bavaria, and emphasized the responsibility of the Bavarian Interior Minister, Adolf Wagner, for these events. Frick demanded that Wagner should continually scrutinize these cases of protective custody, as was the case in Prussia. On 20 February Himmler, who was brought in by Wagner, then secured a decision by the Führer which he minuted in the margin of Frick’s letter of complaint: ‘The prisoners are to remain in custody.’
⁴⁰

From the beginning of 1935 onwards, however, there was an increasing number of civil actions and investigations concerning cases of mistreatment in concentration camps.
⁴¹
According to Hans Gisevius, who at the time was a member of the police department in the Reich Interior Ministry, in the spring of 1935 Frick selected one of the most striking cases, namely, of a Nazi functionary who had been arrested for criticizing the conditions in the Papenburg concentration camp. According to Gisevius, Frick demanded that Himmler should order the immediate release of this man, and said that if the same thing happened again he would begin an action against Himmler for wrongful detention. But his threat proved completely ineffective.

Gisevius recalled another case, in which the lawyer representing the widow of Erich Klausener, the senior civil servant murdered on 30 June 1934, had been arrested by the Gestapo because, in order to represent the insurance claims of his client, he had had to dispute the official version that Klausener had committed suicide. He, Gisevius, had then prepared a report for Frick, which the latter had sent to Hitler. Himmler had recounted the affair at a meeting of Nazi leaders, who had subsequently criticized Frick for the way he had gone about things.

Himmler repeatedly managed to get senior figures to cover up for his arbitrary rule. His position was strengthened not least by the fact that on 2 May 1935 the highest Prussian administrative court decided that Gestapo measures were not subject to revision by the administrative courts.
⁴²
Five days later, during a meeting in which complaints against mistreatment were being discussed, the Gestapa chief gave Hitler a letter from a former Dachau
inmate to Eicke, expressing his gratitude for ‘the good time he had had as a prisoner’.
⁴³
Frick received support for his attempt to limit the arbitrary system in the concentration camps from the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner. In a letter to Frick dated 14 May, Gürtner demanded that, while corporal punishment in the camps should not be abolished, it should be ‘uniformly and clearly’ regulated; arbitrary mistreatment and torture should be ended and brutal guards punished.
⁴⁴

At this time Himmler had already proposed a draft Gestapa law with which he aimed to confront his opponents with a fait accompli. It proposed that the Gestapa should be raised to the status of a Prussian ministry. As far as its responsibilities were concerned, the draft stated tersely: ‘The head of the Secret State Police shall determine the particular matters that are to be transferred to the Secret State Police.’
⁴⁵
However, Himmler’s attempt to acquire such an extensive range of powers was rejected, not only by the Prussian Justice and Interior Ministries but by the whole of the Prussian cabinet.

The cabinet meeting of 27 June 1935, which was attended by Himmler, was also unanimous in taking the opportunity to restrict protective custody. The ministers decided that it was not permissible to prevent lawyers from representing prisoners in protective custody. Moreover, in future, protective custody should not be imposed for a specified period nor should it be imposed instead of a sentence of imprisonment. In addition, Frick informed his colleagues that the Interior Ministry was working on a draft law that would create a clear ‘legal basis’ for the measures of the Secret State Police. Thus, by taking the initiative at Reich level, Frick wanted to try to pre-empt Himmler’s attempt to introduce a regulation for Prussia, and in this way to set limits to his terror system.
⁴⁶

Himmler defended his position by spending the spring and summer of 1935 making strenuous efforts to prove that his radical methods were necessary and, moreover, efficient. In doing so he placed particular emphasis on the ‘communist threat’.

By this time the Gestapo had already extensively researched the structures of the communist milieu. The local activists who were likely to engage in communist underground activity were often already well known and,
thanks to its active recruitment of informants, the Secret State Police was often in a position to roll up regional communist networks at a stroke and carry out mass arrests. Between 1934 and 1935–6 the same process kept recurring in most of the KPD districts, that is to say, the communist networks would be destroyed, then after several months rebuilt, then destroyed again, and then rebuilt until gradually the reserves of communist resistance fighters were exhausted. Any underground activity that still took place in fact usually took place under the eyes of the Gestapo. It determined when the communist underground cells would be finally eliminated and, from 1935 onwards, carried out spectacular mass arrests, during which communists would be arrested ‘as a preventive measure’ without it having to be proved that they had actually taken part in resistance activities.
⁴⁷
The ‘communist threat’ was thus a phenomenon that was largely under the control of the Gestapo, which put Himmler in the comfortable position of being able to produce ‘successes’ in the struggle against the communist underground whenever he needed to. In this way he could ‘prove’ three things: the continuing threat posed by the KPD, the watchfulness of his political police, as well as the need to extend the competence of the Gestapo in order to be ready to meet future threats.

As early as 28 March 1935 Himmler had sent Justice Minister Gürtner a detailed memorandum concerning the ‘communist movement’. In this memorandum, which there is reason to believe was written by Best, he not only outlined the communist threat in the most sombre colours but also argued that it could not be effectively combated by using the methods of a liberal state. The author of the memorandum began with the general statement that in ‘a liberal state’ the police’s hands were ‘tied by formal laws’. The ‘individualistic-liberal values, which asserted the rights of political prisoners, enabled them to behave towards the police in a particularly truculent manner’. This was a very different matter under National Socialism:

Every individual is a member of the organism of the state [ . . . ] If he places himself outside the community and becomes a criminal, he becomes a pest to everybody and will be attacked by everybody, that is to say, by the state. In this struggle the state will be acting in self defence [ . . . ] The police are the arm and the eyes of the law. They must be the first to defend the security of the state under the conditions imposed by having to act in self defence. They cannot treat a criminal who ignores ethical and moral principles, who is excluding himself from the national community, according to aesthetic criteria. He must be made to feel that the state is just as ruthless in its treatment of him as he was intolerant towards the state.

It was thus essential, ‘given the need to protect the state, really to get to grips with criminals during the course of police interrogation’, and equally necessary ‘for the authoritarian, National Socialist state to provide its executive agencies with the means to compel offenders to adopt another attitude towards it. To refer to the integrity of the person of an offender who has been arrested on the basis of evidence is to adopt a liberal perspective.’ That was a clear justification of torture, even if Himmler emphasized in this memorandum that he had forbidden the political police to use any ‘violence’ during interrogations.

The ‘communist movement in Germany’, the memorandum continued, ‘is continually growing. This is not so much the result of economic conditions as, above all, a consequence of the completely inadequate means for pursuing members of the movement’. Only when functionaries who had been arrested ‘can be compelled by every means to reveal their meeting places, their illegal hideouts, etc.’ would there be success in ‘penetrating further into the communist organizations’ and ‘preventing’ the illegal KPD ‘from developing into a mass party’.
⁴⁸

The memorandum is an important piece of evidence pointing to a change in the way the Gestapo operated. Whereas hitherto the Gestapo had primarily responded to actual acts of resistance, now it was moving towards preventive actions against the whole of the communist milieu. In order to bolster his claim that the communist threat was ubiquitous Himmler now launched a wave of arrests covering the whole of the Reich.

To begin with, the five-man Central Executive of the KPD was arrested in March 1935.
⁴⁹
In the same month the Gestapo netted 350 members in Saxony, 300 in Gau Halle-Merseburg, and 280 in Düsseldorf.
⁵⁰
In the Ruhr, where the KPD had already been largely wiped out in 1934, further mass arrests took place in May 1935,
⁵¹
as well as in Cologne during June and July 1935.
⁵²
In Hamburg the Gestapo began to carry out a major series of arrests in June 1935, and by the autumn around 1,000 communists had been caught.
⁵³
In Chemnitz, Zwickau, and other central-German towns the Gestapo also carried out a wave of arrests in the spring and summer of 1935.
⁵⁴
In Munich, where the KPD had been forming its third illegal leadership in Upper Bavaria since 1934,
⁵⁵
the Gestapo had succeeded in penetrating so deeply into the organization that it could more or less direct the party’s underground activities at will. In the summer and autumn of 1935, and during the following summer, the communist groups in the Bavarian capital were finally eliminated in the course of two series of mass arrests.
⁵⁶

On 12 July 1935, when the mass arrests were already in progress, Himmler ordered the first major action that was purely preventive in intention: the arrest of a thousand former KPD functionaries throughout the Reich. In fact, a far larger number of communists were to be taken into ‘preventive custody’ in the course of these mass arrests.
⁵⁷
In addition, in the summer of 1935 Himmler ordered between 200 and 300 communists to be put in concentration camps as a reprisal for a shooting incident that took place between border police and alleged communist smugglers near the Czech border in Saxony.
⁵⁸
In the course of 1935 a total of around 14,000 communist functionaries were arrested.
⁵⁹

In the end, the criticism that was directed at the arbitrary acts of the Gestapo and the cases of mistreatment in the concentration camps, in particular by conservatives, had no effect. It did, however, lead to the whole Gestapo being disciplined through its division into a hierarchy of levels, and its organization being tightened, more effectively controlled from its headquarters, and unified.
⁶⁰
This was above all the work of Werner Best, who had been appointed Heydrich’s deputy and head of the administrative department in the Gestapa at the beginning of 1935.
⁶¹

In February 1936 Himmler was able finally to consolidate his position at the head of the Prussian Gestapa. On 10 February, after almost a year of consultations, the Prussian Gestapa Law was issued, which to large extent reflected his ideas.
⁶²
The law concluded the development of the political police into an autonomous special government department along the lines that he had envisaged. There was no mention of the restrictions on protective custody which the cabinet had agreed the previous June. The decisive factor in this success was Hitler’s very personal interest in this matter. Himmler, who was directly subordinated to him as Reichsführer-SS, provided Hitler with the guarantee of being able to move against anyone at any time he felt like it, as had happened on 30 June 1934. This could now be achieved through an organization that operated to perfection, was highly disciplined, and had been removed from the hierarchy of the internal administration but otherwise worked in accordance with the principles of the Prussian bureaucracy. A secret police that was integrated into the general police apparatus and internal administration, and which Hitler could only have deployed by involving the ministerial bureaucracy, would not have provided him with this capability. Thus, Himmler was the man who enabled Hitler actually to exercise his position as a dictator with, in principle, unlimited power through the deployment of state terror.