The battle for the Gestapo began even before Himmler took over the Bavarian Police in April, 1933. At first it was a long-range battle. By the time Hitler became Chancellor, Himmler and Heydrich between them had raised the number of the S.S. to fifty thousand, and the organization was very strongly officered. Himmler himself was known as the Reichsfuehrer S.S. (RFSS). Beneath him there tailed away a complete quasi-military hierarchy, from generals to privates, known by the terms invented for the S.A., of which the S.S. was still on paper a part.1 It had been Heydrich’s idea to recruit in addition to the open membership a shadow corps of S.S. officers who were to keep their affiliations secret until the Nazis came to power. Thus, in key positions all over Germany, including Government offices in which membership of any Party was forbidden, there were high-ranking S.S. officers waiting for the moment to reveal themselves and put on the black uniforms they had never worn. The regular police forces of the Reich had their quota of these, a striking example being Artur Nebe of the Prussian Criminal Police or Kripo, a sort of C.I.D., who will become a familiar apparition in these pages. It was the infiltration technique which has now become notorious in another context. The fifth column did not begin in Spain: it began in Germany under the Weimar Republic. The Nazis began their career of treachery not against foreign states but against their own.
When on January 30th, 1933, the ancient and decrepit Hindenburg crowned his postwar career of ineptitude and deceit by inviting Hitler to become Chancellor of Germany, he committed to the care of the Nazis the whole State apparatus of a system they despised. For the moment Hitler had to accept what was called a coalition, which meant that important offices were filled by men he proposed to get rid of at the first opportunity. For instance, von Papen, not a Nazi, who by his own coup d’état of the year before had shaken the inadequate foundations of the Federal Republic, became Vice-Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia. But Hitler was able to make certain key appointments, and the most critical of these was the elevation of Goering to be Prussian Minister of the Interior, with control of the Prussian police. Goering, of course, did not report to von Papen, who was his technical superior: at that time, with Goebbels, he was closer to Hitler than any other man, and more than any other man he had the responsibility of carrying out the Nazi revolution, which could not begin until Hitler had achieved power by constitutional means.
With the war between us and the early ‘thirties it may seem odd to think of the blusterer who was going to smash Britain with his Air Force as a revolutionary; but, indeed, Goering was precisely that. He was, in spite of soft living and expensive habits, a man of immense energy and drive. His vicious temper and his appetite for pleasure, his hatred of his enemies and his generosity to his friends, were all equally unbridled. This ex-fighter pilot of the First World War, gross, debauched, yet physically very brave, a buccaneer by nature, had developed a mystique of loyalty: he demanded it, he gave it. He became a revolutionary because he wanted power and riches, to play the despotic patron as well as to destroy—unlike Goebbels, who was a revolutionary because he hated others having power and riches. When he had achieved both, and allowed himself to believe that the war was won, he ceased to be a revolutionary and became a conservative. It was only then that he took to wearing snow-white togas and jeweled headdresses.
In 1933 he was a savage driver. He enjoyed his own savagery so much, and could be such a good companion on occasion, that it seemed almost a shame when people with less zest for living objected to his activities as the chief policeman of Prussia. But there was a great deal to object to. And the savagery was deepseated. He showed it to the whole world for the first time during the Reichstag Fire Trial; when he could not contain himself, and roared apoplectic threats across the court at Dimitrov, then an admired and pitied figure, who was later to become a dictator himself and to end his days in Moscow. And Goering retained his savagery to the end. In the closing stages of the war he was talking to Ciano in Berlin: Greece was starving.
“We cannot worry unduly about the hunger of the Greeks. It is a misfortune which will strike many other peoples beside them. In the camps for Russian prisoners they have begun to eat each other. This year between twenty and thirty million people will die of hunger in Russia. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be done about it. It is obvious that if humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples.”
He retained his savagery. But he also retained something of an individual charm which was the undoing of many—of people as far apart as Sir Nevile Henderson, His Majesty’s Ambassador to Berlin, and Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo under Goering. Even in Ciano’s report of that terrible conversation there is something of the Goering which made able strangers lose their judgment. Hitler, Himmler, and others had been saying the same thing, but flatly, defiantly, and without a shadow of irony or philosophic doubt. In Goering’s tones there is just such a shadow. He was a complex villain if ever there was one. He also kept his bravery to the end and made a showing at Nuremberg which shamed his colleagues. He also kept his stubborn cunning, defeating the hangman.
All these attributes have tended to obscure the simple fact that in the early days of the Nazi revolution Hitler relied on Goering’s savagery to beat down the opposition ruthlessly. And Goering did what was required of him. The role of Goering himself, as controller of the Prussian police, is as clear as daylight. The role of the Gestapo, of which he was nominal head, and which he created, is far less clear. The main evidence concerning its first activities derives from two sources, from two men who detested each other and contradict each other at every turn. Rudolf Diels, who actually started the Gestapo under Goering and ran it for a year, and Hans Bernd Gisevius, who vainly aspired to the job and turned his defeat to advantage.
The S.A., the Storm Troopers, the louts in brown shirts and jackboots who had roared and bullied their way to power, expected blood when their Fuehrer was translated, and they were determined to have it. They had the freedom of the streets and beat up or kicked to death in their improvised “bunkers” anyone they took a dislike to. Their chief enemies were the Communists, who, at the last election, had voted nearly six million strong; but anybody with either a liberal or a Marxist attitude was their predestined victim; and soon they had seized so many that they improvised special holding centers where they could torture their prisoners to their hearts’ content.
The man who first thought of this idea was Karl Heines, the S.A. chieftain of Dresden, who put up a barbed-wire stockade for his captives; but soon there were others. And in March, 1933, the idea of the concentration camp was officially blessed, and Oranienburg was set up by Goering himself just outside Berlin and staffed by the S.A.
The S.S. kept a little aloof from the crudest of the street bullying. They had their own self-consciously superior code. Apart from the higher eadership, they were racially pure and looked like a set of blond Commandos; they had their rigidly idiotic marriage rules, laid down by Himmler, who himself died in doubt about his own ancestry; they had their motto: My Honor is Loyalty. They also had their own select torture chamber in the Columbia House.
The regular police, as such, took little part in these activities; but, then, the regular police had taken little part in anything very much for some years past. Following the lead of the democratic politicians, they had virtually abdicated, while retaining their nominal positions; and the various private armies brawled and killed at will, while they stood by: they stood by most steadfastly when the Nazis were winning. “Parliamentarianism is not sick because it is threatened by dictators; it is threatened by dictators because Parliament has abdicated,” said Chancellor Wirth in the Reichstag three years before Hitler came to power. And this was a true verdict. There were many in the Government offices who were appalled at the prospect of Nazi rule, and had everything to lose by it; but they had done nothing to prevent its coming, and so were disarmed when it came. The same might be said of the police: “The police are not abject because they are threatened by Himmler; they are threatened by Himmler because they are abject.”
Goering, when on January 31st he strode in high spirits into his new office in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, was bent on a purge of the police, and not so much because the police were anti-Nazi as because they were no good. As Chief of the Prussian Police, responsible to him as Minister of the Interior, he appointed the young S.S. General Kurt Daluege, then twenty-nine years old, blond and crass, recommended by Himmler as Chief of the S.S., and cast by him to be the spearhead of his projected advance on Berlin. But Goering had no idea of letting the S.S. come between him and his own personal aims. He needed a small, compact apparatus of his own. He needed his own man, not too scrupulous, who knew his way about the files of the pre-Hitler police, files which contained confidential information not only about the political enemies of the Nazis, but also about the leading Nazis themselves, Goering’s colleagues and rivals; he needed, moreover, a man who, with the authority of the State Police, could put pressure where pressure might be required in his, Goering’s, own material interests. He needed, in a word, an instrument of blackmail.
Thus it was that one of the few regular officials he spared was Rudolf Diels, then thirty-three, an up-and-coming careerist (not a secret Nazi: Diels was not the sort of man to commit himself to any cause until it had clearly won), who had been specializing in anti-Communism in the Political Department. He had met Diels before in circumstances which are still obscure, and now decided that he was the very man to act as his personal combination of spy, blackmailer, and bulldog. The arrangement worked so well that after two months, and when Hitler had won his election, Goering decided to detach Diels’ office from its proper home as a branch of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and set it up in a headquarters of its own, where it would be free from interference by Himmler’s S.S. henchmen. Thus Department IA of the Prussian Political police became the Gestapo, with Rudolf Diels as its first head, under Goering.
It was an odd partnership: on the one side the Renaissance figure of the supreme Nazi bully, on the other the shady apparition with no roots, who had graduated from one of the extreme right-wing Students’ Corps to the Civil Service of the crippled Weimar Republic, which he despised. Brilliant, inordinately ambitious, hag-ridden, Rudolf Diels shows himself as a queer combination of a twilight adventurer, man of affairs (cynical in the German tradition), and intellectual. He is shrewd and yet humorless; highly educated, and yet illiterate when it came to true understanding; a man clever and balanced enough to impress Goering, but sufficiently lacking in judgment to take on the incomparably more able Heydrich in single combat. He is weak enough to need bolstering up with the delusion that his duty lay in serving the Nazis, yet strong enough to fight the S.A. and the S.S. in his own interests with boldness and cunning. He saw in Goering’s favor not only a supreme opportunity for advancement, but also the chance to influence the course of German history. In the end he was broken by a stronger and more single-minded power, to which he had to surrender the whole apparatus of the Gestapo. By that time he had given up fighting and took what offered. Under Goering’s protection (for Goering was loyal to his friends) he survived in nominally high positions until, in the end, Himmler caught up with him and he found himself in the basement of the requisitioned art school in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, a prisoner of the organization which, with hopes so high, he himself had founded in the first flush of the Nazi Revolution.
When it was all over he wrote a remarkable book which he called characteristically Lucifer Ante Portas, a sustained and closely argued apology for his career in the Gestapo. In it he represents himself as the man who stood between countless innocents and the vicious brutality of the undisciplined brown-shirt mob and the evil fanaticism of the black S.S. In this defense there can be found that golden thread of truth which knits together the really superior lie. Torture in those early days was the perquisite of the S.A. and the S.S., who had restored to Europe on a large and open scale the practice of degrading the spirit by breaking the flesh which for centuries had survived only in a hole-in-corner manner. It was not until later that the house in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse became the chief torture chamber of the Reich; and, although the infant Gestapo made its arrests and handed its victims over to the care of the S.A. concentration camp commanders, it also intervened on occasion to save individuals seized by the S.A. and the S.S. It warned others of imminent danger in time for them to escape. At Christmas, the first Christmas of the new régime, Diels himself was influential in obtaining Goering’s amnesty which emptied the camps of many prisoners. In such engagements he quarrelled dangerously with both S.A. and S.S. leaders and frequently irritated Goering in the process—for although Goering resented the power of both organizations and was determined to keep his grip on his own Gestapo, he needed them to batter down the enemies of the régime. This made it difficult for Diels.
What the author of Lucifer Ante Portas omits to indicate, however, is that his long and ultimately vain battle with the S.S. and the S.A. was in the main a part of his own struggle for power. He was fighting not for order and justice as such, but for order to be imposed by Rudolf Diels and not by Heinrich Himmler. It is clear, however, that he was not a natural brute and took no delight in wanton violence. He was not a totally ruthless man like Heydrich, a totally conscienceless stooge like Daluege, a methodical madman like Himmler. If Diels had been able to maintain himself at the head of the Gestapo and defeat the S.S., events in Germany would have taken a milder course. But it is equally clear that he was committed completely to the Nazi revolution and, to retain his own position, was prepared to go along with it while fighting for personal ends the men who were most actively helping to make it. The reader of Lucifer Ante Portas, to say nothing of certain evidence at Nuremberg, might gain the impression that the Gestapo in those early days was a sanctuary of justice and a solace for the afflicted. Diels, as the career official, the regular policeman, is represented as standing for order and sanity in a howling wilderness of barbarity. The picture was a good deal less idyllic than that.
Diels was a regular police official. His new master, Goering, had immediately started making clear his attitude towards the regular police, the colleagues of Diels. It was due to the purge of the regular force that Diels got his chance.
Diels was also an opponent of the S.A. and the S.S. His whole defense rests on the plea that only by remaining where he was could he curb the excesses of the S.A. and the S.S. But Goering had not been in office for more than a few days before he issued a directive to the reorganized police which defined them as accomplices of the S.A. and the S.S.:
“The police have at all costs to avoid anything suggestive of hostility to the S.A., S.S. and Stahlhelm, since these organizations contain the most important constructive national elements … it is the business of the police to abet any form of national propaganda.”
Objective justice, on Hitler’s specific orders, was defunct. Men, like the young lawyer Heinz Litten, who insisted on defending enemies of the revolution, were taken away and tortured and killed—or driven to kill themselves. Arbitrary violence was to take its place. So Goering continued:
“Police officers who make use of firearms in the execution of their duties will, without regard to the consequences of such use, benefit by my protection; those who out of a misplaced regard for such consequences fail in their duty will be punished in accordance with the regulations.… Every official must bear in mind that failure to act will be regarded more seriously than an error due to taking action.”
On February 22nd these instructions to the regular police were rendered superfluous. By a special decree Goering added fifty thousand Auxiliary Police to the regular forces, by the simple expedient of issuing white armbands to as many S.A. and S.S. men, arming them, and giving them full police powers.
In March, in a whole series of speeches to mass audiences in the course of the election campaign, he developed his attitude. It was now that he ordered the construction of the first official concentration camp, Oranienburg, at Sachsenhausen outside Berlin, to be run and staffed by the S.A.
“Fellow Germans,” he declared at Frankfurt-am-Main, “my measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don’t have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate; nothing more.”
He then proceeded to describe how he intended to carry out this modest mission:
“This struggle will be a struggle against chaos, and I shall not conduct it with the power of any police; a bourgeois state might have done that. Certainly I shall use the power of the State and the Police to the utmost, my dear Communists, so do not draw any false conclusions. But the real struggle to the death, in which my fist will lie heavily on your necks, I shall conduct with those down there—and they are the brownshirts.”
To a mass meeting a few days later in Essen he declared:
“Even if we make many mistakes, at least we shall be acting: I may shoot a little wildly, one way or the other. But at least I shoot.”
And on another occasion:
“Every bullet which leaves the barrel of a police pistol now is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered: I ordered all this. I back it up. I assume the responsibility, and I am not afraid to do so.”
And lest it should be thought that this was simply bombast, designed to strike terror into the hearts of an audience of sheep and create a general feeling of hopelessness in the hearts of the opposition, here is Goering again, speaking officially as Chief of Police to his own police officers in Berlin. The date is February 20th, seven days before the Reichstag Fire, four days before the police raid on Karl Liebknecht House, the Communist Party H.Q., two days before the enrollment of the S.A. and the S.S. as Auxiliary Police:
“I can do nothing against the Red mob with a police force which is afraid of being punished for doing what is only its duty. The responsibility must be placed squarely where it belongs. It does not lie with the junior official in the street. I want to hammer it home into your heads that the responsibility lies with me alone. You must be quite clear about that. When you shoot, I shoot. When a man lies dead, it I who have shot him, even if I happen to be sitting up there in my office in the Ministry. For it is my responsibility alone.”
Nothing, one would think, could be more unambiguous than that. Goering, as Controller of Police, categorically instructs his police to shoot first and ask questions afterwards, threatens them with punishment if they falter in this duty, and takes upon himself full responsibility for his actions. The thugs of the S.A. and the S.S. are enrolled as policemen, and the S.S. and S.A. as a whole are above the law and enjoy Goering’s full protection. Rudolf Diels in his first two months under Goering heard all this, knew all about it, and by April 4th, when he took over the newly founded Gestapo, knew precisely what sort of a man his master was. Diels himself has quoted these passages from Goering’s oratory in his own book.
Also, before he took over the Gestapo, he knew what sort of a man Hitler was. He gives us a vivid description of the scene on the balcony of the great hall of the Reichstag with Hitler staring down in silence at the great sea of flame, and then suddenly beginning to rant:
“His face was scarlet with emotion, and with the heat, which, up there in the dome, was intense. He started yelling as though he would burst and with a more total abandonment of self-control than I had ever seen in him before:
“ ‘Now there must be no mercy. Anyone who stands in our way will be trampled underfoot. The German people won’t understand mercy. Every Communist official will be shot out of hand. The Communist Deputies must hang this very night.…’ ”