Heinrich Himmler : A Life (41 page)

In 1936, as part of his anti-church policy, Himmler gave the SD a ‘special project’ of a peculiar nature. This was the ‘Special Witch Project’ (
HexenSonderauftrag
), with which Himmler endeavoured to find out the extent of witch-hunting in the past.
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This was prompted by the public row caused by the 1935 German Peasant Calendar issued by the Reich Food Estate, controlled by Richard Walther Darré, who shared Himmler’s views. This had referred to the ‘nine million [ . . . ] fighters for justice, champions of the faith, heretics, and witches who had been murdered, tortured to death, and burnt’ at the instigation of the Christian churches.
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In his speech to the Goslar Peasants’ Rally Himmler had alluded to the row that this had caused: ‘We can visualize the fires burning at the stakes on which tens of thousands of the martyred and tortured bodies of mothers and girls of our nation burnt to ashes as a result of the witch trials.’
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It is possible that he even believed one of his own ancestors had been burnt as a witch.
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In any event, Himmler considered it a unique opportunity to catalogue all the material dealing with the persecution of witches that was scattered in numerous archives in Germany, and use it to mount a propaganda campaign against the churches, calling them to account for their historical responsibility for this mass murder. A task of historical importance for the SS!

To begin with the task was given to the ‘SS Literature Section’ at the German Library in Leipzig, an offshoot of the SD, which from 1936 onwards had been supervised by its Central Department I, 3. After the establishment of the Reich Security Main Office in 1939 the H [
Hexe
] Special Project was transferred to the Department for Researching the Opposition under Franz Six. It had fourteen full-time employees, and this team set about systematically researching the extensive literature and examining every case of witch persecution in the German archives. The researches were carried out clandestinely and were continued until 1944. Their results were contained in 33,846 pages of data, which together formed a substantial ‘Witch File’.

Himmler also commissioned the author Friedrich Norfolk, who was a full-time employee of Six’s department, to write a historical novel on the subject of the persecution of witches, and also requested him to write ‘a large number of shorter H[exen]-stories of 60 to 100 pages’.
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Herbert Blank, a ‘special prisoner of the RFSS’ in Sachsenhausen on account of his work for Otto Strasser who was by profession an author of historical novels, was given the task of studying witch-trial records in his cell and of writing short stories on the basis of these.
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A picture book and a film on the topic were also planned, as well as a serious academic series.
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In the end, however, this huge project was basically restricted to the gathering of material. There was no significant scholarly work done on the material and no substantial programme of publications. Whether this was because the people involved were not in a position (or not willing) to produce more, or whether Himmler found himself prevented from advancing the project on the grounds of church policy, is unclear.

In May 1944, in a speech to Wehrmacht generals, Himmler confessed:

In the past and right up to the present day I have done many things—I admit that quite openly—which were not permissible under the existing laws, but needed to
be done on the basis of the laws of reason and common sense. Naturally, in some cases I had no authority under the law to arrest a criminal who had not committed an offence. The law laid down that I, acting as the police, had to wait until this man, who had already carried out three burglaries and maybe had killed two people in the process and had done his fifteen years in gaol, was caught in the act or had committed a new offence.
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By stating this principle of neutralizing the criminal before he could commit a crime, Himmler described with disarming logic the programme on which he embarked in 1936 to reorientate the criminal police (Kripo) towards a preventive form of combating crime, and in doing so he was guided by the utopian vision of a ‘national community without criminals’.

With the issuing of the ‘New Organization of the Criminal Police’ on 20 September 1936 Himmler transferred to the Prussian State Criminal Police Department ‘the practical direction of the police’ in all the federal states. The logical next step of transforming this office into the Reich Criminal Police Department occurred on 15 July 1937. The existing criminal police apparatus was now controlled centrally as a Reich criminal police service, organized hierarchically, and unified through a system of regional and district criminal police departments.
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Many of the measures undertaken during Himmler’s regime resulted in a modernization of the criminal police, such as had already been demanded by many experts since the 1920s. Training was unified and centralized, a leadership college was created for the security police as well as a criminal police college in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin.
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So-called Reich centres were created in the Reich Criminal Police Department for each type of crime (capital crimes, burglary, counterfeiting, and so on), which concentrated above all on serial offences committed at the national level and on particularly serious cases. An ‘Institute of Criminal Technology’
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was set up and technical centres were established in the provinces for routine tasks. Considerable emphasis was placed on the efficient gathering and transmission of data.
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From 1937 on Himmler appointed Inspectors of the Security Police and SD throughout the Reich, the majority of whom belonged to the Gestapo and SD and were intended to increase the effectiveness of the two agencies.
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However, the aim of amalgamating the criminal police and the Gestapo to form the security police was only partially realized. Although numerous criminal police officers were transferred to the Gestapo to deal with its shortage of experts in the detection of crime, there was neither a routine exchange of personnel between the two branches of the security
police nor was there a single career track for the members of the security police. Instead, the two branches developed independent images and became rivals, a rivalry that was encouraged by Himmler in that he allowed both to pursue particular ‘delinquents’ such as homosexuals, ‘asocials’, and so-called ‘racial offenders’ in competition with one another. There is evidence for believing that in the process of this competition the more brutal methods of the Gestapo rubbed off on the Kripo.
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The unification, centralization, and modernization of the criminal police created the preconditions for shifting the focus of its work, as indicated, to the prevention of crime. In 1933 the regime had already introduced ‘preventive custody’ for repeat offenders. However, this measure had been restricted to a few hundred people who had to serve their time in concentration camps. At the beginning of 1937 Himmler decided considerably to increase the number of offenders under preventive custody. He told Wehrmacht officers in January that,

in view of the fact that I consider criminality in Germany is still far too high, I am going to lock up far more career criminals than hitherto after they have committed a few offences, say three or four, and then not let them out again. We, and particularly we with our sentimental humanitarian views and inadequate laws, can no longer justify letting these people loose on humanity, especially these murderers, people who commit robberies, car thefts etc., who cost us an arm and a leg to chase after them.
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A follow-up telex to the Prussian State Criminal Office of 23 February 1937 stated that ‘the population was seriously disturbed’ by ‘robberies, systematic burglaries, and serious sex crimes’, and Himmler ordered that 2,000 ‘unemployed professional and habitual criminals should be immediately arrested and confined in concentration camps’.
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This action was carried out in March 1937, and 2,000 men with previous convictions were in fact arrested and confined in camps. The number of ‘preventive prisoners’ quintupled as a result of the action; preventive custody was no longer an exception but became routine.
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The action of March 1937 represented the prelude to the escalation of preventive criminal policy, which was also racially charged.
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For the transition to the combating of crime through prevention was justified in biological terms. According to the most influential criminologists and their colleagues, who called themselves ‘criminological biologists’, criminality was above all genetically determined. Thus it was necessary to ‘eliminate’
those marginal social groups who had been made out to be the bearers of ‘asocial’ genes and who therefore had a tendency to criminality. The combating of criminality was thus a matter of race, and was placed in the service of Nazi ideology. At the beginning of 1938 a Central Office for Genealogical Research on Criminals was established in the Reich Criminal Police Department.
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The implementation of preventive criminal police action was based on the ‘Fundamental Decree Concerning the Preventive Combating of Crime by the Police’ issued by the Reich Interior Minister on 14 December 1937, which expressly referred to the results of research in criminal biology.
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The preventive combating of crime was to be secured in two ways: first, through ‘the systematic police surveillance’ of those with previous convictions, for example through police restrictions on residence, bans on making contact, imposition of abstinence from alcohol, and so on; secondly through the extended use of ‘preventive custody’. These measures were to be applied not only to those who had been legally convicted but also to people who had been deemed ‘asocial’.
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While in January 1938 the criminal police prepared a major action to take thousands of ‘asocials’ into custody, Himmler ordered the Gestapo to take action independently against ‘work-shy’ persons, a further example of the way in which he put the Kripo under pressure through competition under the security police umbrella. He ordered the labour exchanges to report to the Gestapo all those who were able-bodied and who had twice rejected job offers, or had started work but then left it without good reason. The action lasted from 21 to 30 April and resulted in 2,000 more prisoners being sent to Buchenwald.
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The criminal police began its asocial operation (‘Work-shy Reich’) on 13 June. In a telex of 1 June 1938 Heydrich had ordered the regional Kripo offices within a week ‘to take at least 200 male able-bodied persons (asocials)’ into police preventive custody in their area. They should focus above all on tramps, beggars, ‘Gypsies and people who are travelling around in a Gypsy-like way’, and pimps, as well as ‘persons who have committed many previous offences such as resisting arrest, bodily harm, affray, trespass, etc. and have thereby demonstrated that they are unwilling to fit in with the national community’.
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The decree of 1 June had justified the operation not simply on the grounds that ‘criminality has its roots in the asocial’, but also cited a second motive: the rigorous implementation of the Four Year Plan, which did not permit ‘asocial
people to evade work and thereby sabotage the Four Year Plan’. In fact the measure had been prompted by Himmler’s Four-Year-Plan representative, Ulrich Greifelt; it belongs within the context of the compulsory transition from a labour market to a regime of ‘labour deployment’ in order thereby to alleviate the alarming labour shortage resulting from rearmament.
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Significantly, the timing of the action coincided with the construction of production facilities in the concentration camps for which workers were required. Moreover, ‘Work-shy Reich’ may well have been intended to have a disciplining and intimidating effect on the whole workforce as an accompaniment to the introduction of civil conscription, which occurred on 22 June 1938.
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On 1 June Heydrich also ordered that in the same week ‘all male Jews in each criminal police district who have been punished with a term of imprisonment of more than one month shall be taken into police preventive custody’. Obviously, the aim was thereby to associate part of the Jewish minority with the milieu of asocials and criminals, a trend that is also apparent in press propaganda during these weeks.
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The raids on ‘asocial’ marginal groups continued during the following months. At the end of 1938 12,921 people were in preventive custody and 3,231 persons were under systematic surveillance.
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Although we do not possess reliable criminal statistics for the whole period from 1933 to 1945, there is nevertheless some evidence that the rate of criminality did in fact decline during the years after 1933. The rigorous combating of criminality, in particular the arrest of ‘potential’ offenders, will presumably have contributed to this. What was decisive, however, was the fact that with the ending of the world economic crisis the enormous increase in the rate of criminality during the years 1930–3 reverted to a normal level.
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In the course of the measures against ‘asocials’ the police also increasingly took action against the Gypsies. They belonged to the groups who, during the raids of 1938, became a particular target of the criminal police.
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In previous years the Gypsies had already been subject to increased surveillance and discrimination by the authorities, and since 1935 the local governments of various big cities had begun to confine Gypsies in special closed camps.
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From the mid-1930s onwards, however, the Nazi system had begun to place Gypsy persecution on a new foundation. The origins of the ‘Gypsy plague’ with regard to their alleged ‘genetic roots’ were now to be tackled and dealt
with. Gypsies were particularly liable to fall victim to the sterilization measures introduced by the authorities. Marriage with ‘those of German blood’ was banned on the basis of both the Law for the Protection of German Blood and the Marriage Health Law.
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