There was nothing now that could hold back Himmler and Heydrich except the will of the Fuehrer: and Hitler was well satisfied with them both. He had got Germany where he wanted her. He was comparatively uninterested in domestic politics. His concern was to turn the nation into a first-class fighting power. “For us the revolution is no permanent condition.” he declared in his speech defending the massacre of June 30th. And indeed it was not. Already, a year earlier, he had said, “Many more revolutions have been successful at the outset than have, after their initial success, been checked and brought to a standstill at the right moment.” The right moment, a little belatedly, had been caught. The revolutionary flame was dead. Hitler was free to build up the might of Germany in collaboration with the generals, the manufacturers, the financiers.
There was to be no political life in the country. All parties were banned, and he. Hitler, proposed to govern by decree. The administration was provided by the purged offices of local government. The discipline and the drive would be provided by a police terror. Himmler and Heydrich had shown that they knew how to provide that, and they could be safely left to carry on. Goering, with his own position secured by the murder of Roehm and the final abasement of Goebbels, could from now on afford to loosen his grip on the police.
But Himmler and Heydrich went very quietly. They settled down to consolidate what they had and to extend the limits of their power. The Gestapo and the S.D. provided the brain; the general S.S., the physical threat; the S.S. Death’s-head formations (the concentration camp guards), the ultimate terror. It was the task of the Gestapo and the S.D. to penetrate into every aspect of public and private life secretly, and publicly to create a legend of terror designed to make them appear even more omniscient and ubiquitous than in fact they were. Their power soon outran their official mandate. Nearly two years were to pass before the Gestapo was legalized as such and Himmler became officially what he already was in fact, the Chief of the unified German Police. It was not until 1939, on the eve of the war, that the instrument of terror achieved its final shape.
The Gestapo was finally brought on to a legal footing on February 10th, 1936, by virtue of a Prussian statute which recognized the peculiar position it had carved out for itself and regularized its ways. The statute which made it legal at the same time raised it above the law. Clause Seven stated that there was to be no appeal from the decision of the Gestapo, and the judiciary was forbidden to re-examine these decisions. This meant that once an individual was in the hands of the Gestapo he was debarred from any appeal to the law as traditionally understood. It meant, further, that a man could be acquitted by the courts, or released from prison on the expiry of a court sentence, and immediately rearrested by the Gestapo and taken into Protective Custody—i.e., sent to a concentration camp. The spirit of the matter is best conveyed in the words of Hitler’s notorious proclamation of October 22nd, 1938: “…every means adopted for carrying out the will of the Leader is considered legal, even though it may conflict with existing statutes and precedents.”
On June 17th, 1936, Himmler was formally appointed Chief of German Police; and from that moment began the long, calculated campaign to detach the Gestapo from the State apparatus and transfer it effectively to the S.S. and to put the S.S. into a position to dominate completely the police apparatus as a whole.
On June 26th, 1936, the police was formally divided into two parts: the uniformed and the plain clothes; or the Order Police (Orpo) and the Security Police (Sipo), which included the Gestapo, the Kripo, and, in effect, the S.D. Daluege became head of the Orpo; Heydrich, of the Sipo. The two branches were run by Himmler as Chief of German Police; but he was working towards the day when he would run them as Reichsfuehrer S.S.
On September 20th, Inspectors of Orpo (IdO) and Sipo (IdS) were appointed to each Wehrkreis, or Military District, to co-operate with the Gauleiter and the Wehrkreis Commander. At the same time it was decreed that the S.S. Leader in each main territorial sector of the S.S. (Oberabschnitt) should also be Chief of Police for his area. The State administration was being swamped by the S.S. On the same day the Prussian Gestapo became the headquarters of the Political Police throughout Germany. On October 1st the term Gestapo was extended to cover the unified Political Police of the Reich.
Eight months later, on May 15th, 1937, Himmler, as Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. (RfSS), achieved a major objective. It was decreed that all rulings issued by his office were valid as Ministerial decisions. On November 11th, the peculiar affinities of the Gestapo and the S.S. Security Service (S.D.) were recognized by law:
“The S.D. of the RfSS, as a Party and Reichs Government organization, has to carry out important tasks: in particular it is required to assist the Security Police [i.e., Gestapo and Kripo]. The S.D. is consequently active on behalf of the Reich; and this demands close and intelligent co-operation between the S.D. and the officials of the General and Interior Administration.”
This decree was a logical outcome of a decree of June 23rd, 1938, which laid it down that all Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) personnel must be enrolled in the S.S. This meant, in effect, that the Gestapo, a State organization, was brought under control of the S.D., a Party organization.
The final stage was reached in 1939 when Heydrich achieved his personal ambition. The Main Office of the Security Police in the Reichs Ministry of the Interior, the Gestapo and the Kripo that is, was taken away from the State organization and from the surveillance of the Minister of the Interior and merged into the Main Security Office of the S.S., which was henceforth known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or R.S.H.A., directly under Heydrich. The Gestapo became Section IV of this institution; the Kripo was Section V. The S.D. (home intelligence) was Section III; the S.D. (foreign intelligence) was Section VI. Sections I and II were concerned with Personnel and Administration.
There was also Section N (Nachrichten), the all important technical communications section; and, later, when the S.S. was making its bid to duplicate the armed forces, Section VII, which was concerned with Scientific Exploitation, and set up its own rocket research station in rivalry to Peenemuende.
In 1943 the circle was closed when Himmler himself became Reichs Minister of the Interior. By that time Heydrich was dead.
This tabulation of dates and appointments is not irrelevant. It is of extreme importance for an appreciation of the interlocking responsibilities of the Gestapo, the Orpo, the Kripo, the S.D., and the S.S. in general. Great efforts have been made by interested parties to obscure the true picture. At one time and another members of all the organizations listed here have sought to disclaim all connection with each other. But the chain of command and the interlock are both unambiguous.
The Orpo and the Sipo were connected through Himmler as Chief of Police. The leadership of the police and the rank-and-file membership of the Gestapo and Kripo were restricted to the S.S. The Gestapo and the Kripo formed part of the security service of the S.S., first under Heydrich, then under Kaltenbrunner. The S.S. under Himmler also provided the concentration camp guards (Death’s-head formations), the concentration camp administration (W.V.H.A.), and, later, the special S.S. divisions, the Waffen S.S., which fought at the front. The S.S. in the end became a State within the State, duplicating almost every aspect of the State administration. It captured the Intelligence services of the Armed Forces; it duplicated every administrative office; it duplicated even the most elaborate and costly research projects; it fought the armed services for supremacy all along the line, and in the end was winning. The Gestapo was its spearhead. In the end, as Amt IV of the R.S.H.A. under its shadowy chief, Lieutenant General Heinrich Mueller, who reported directly to Heydrich, it dominated the whole of occupied Europe, and it contained the following sections and subsections, which illustrate its range:
All these came under Section IVA of the R.S.H.A. After the outbreak of war Section IVB was added to cover the occupied countries: IVB 1 for Western Territories; IVB 2 for Eastern; IVB 3 for South-eastern; IVB 4 for passes and identification. A special subsection, IVB A (Arbeit) was created to look after the employment of foreign workers; and another, IVB G (Grenze) to control Customs and frontier protection and inspection. R.S.H.A. Amt IVA 6a at the top of a letter-heading looks insignificant enough; but it stood for the immense system of card indices and dossiers which penetrated into the personal lives of every German citizen. R.S.H.A. Amt IVA 4b, again, was responsible for the rounding up, transportation, shooting, and gassing to death of at least three million Jews.
There was no murdering of Jews, except incidentally, in the early days of the new Gestapo. Himmler and Heydrich were still maneuvering for the absolute power which would make Auschwitz possible. The Jews could be picked off when the time came. Meanwhile there were heavier antagonists. The German people as a whole had to be regimented; the Army had to be put in its place (Himmler and Heydrich had no illusions about the enduring quality of the Army’s gratitude to them for breaking the back of the S.A., especially when it dawned on the generals that Himmler was going to prove a far more dangerous and purposeful threat to the sovereignty of the Armed Forces than Roehm ever was); the power of the Churches had to be undermined.
For the purposes of general supervision and repression the Gestapo modeled itself closely on the Soviety Secret Police. Himmler had at his command an extremely able police-officer, Heinrich Mueller, who became known as Gestapo Mueller, a close and devoted student of Soviet methods. Mueller was impressed by the efficiency of the internal spy system which had been perfected by the Soviet Government, the effect of which, ideally, was to isolate the individual by making it impossible for anybody to trust anybody else. He set to work to reproduce this system in Germany by more economical means.
He built up a cell system which enrolled quantities of ordinary citizens as honorary part-time members of the Gestapo. Thus there was the Blockwart, the concierge, who had to report on the activities of every tenant in his apartment block. Every Air Raid Warden was also a corresponding member of the Gestapo. Every labor group had a Gestapo representative. And, on top of this, voluntary informers were encouraged by every possible means. As the Russians had discovered, there is nothing like the voluntary informer for creating a general atmosphere of unease and apprehension: he operates by personal spite, or by the desire to ingratiate himself with the authorities; he costs nothing; his information is usually valueless in any specific sense; but since every human being at some time commits some indiscretion, he enables the secret police to swoop where it is least expected (and often least needed) and give the desired impression of possessing an all-seeing eye.
As far as the regular membership was concerned, there was no difficulty in recruiting. Any regular police official was liable to find himself drafted into the Gestapo as a matter of routine posting; and although a handful of individuals at one time and another avoided such postings, by open refusal, or by subterfuge, the average police official seems to have taken it as part of the day’s work and to have made no complaint, being prepared to carry out in the German manner the most atrocious orders without any sense of personal responsibility, or even involvement. There were also volunteers, of course, men like Heinrich Baab of Frankfurt, whom we meet later, who drifted into the regular Gestapo because the work suited them. Baab himself had been a Block supervisor in the S.A. He had volunteered as a Gestapo informer for fifty marks a month, proved his worth, and was then taken into the Frankfurt police for duties first with the Gestapo, then with the S.D. He was a loutish brute with a good working-class background, a man with a chip on his shoulder who found fulfilment in the uninhibited exercise of subordinate authority. There were many like him.
But not all members of the Gestapo were trained Gestapo agents. There was a large corps of administrative officials who had no police training at all, but were simply civil servants: in 1944 there were some three thousand of these, or less than ten per cent of the regular force. There were a host of junior clerks and typists, many of them, and particularly in war-time, women, often the wives and relatives of regular officials. The so-called Executive Officials, the true Gestapo agents, formed just under half of the total force of forty thousand in 1944, and they were divided into various grades. First the Senior Grade civil servants, the Regierungsrat and the Kriminairat, who were highly educated men. Then the slightly lower grade, beginning with the Kriminal Inspektor; then the medium grade, beginning with the Kriminal Assistant. All these, most of them civil servants by nature with an ingrained police outlook, were sent to special training courses at the Fuehrer School, where they were inculcated with the outlook and techniques of Gestapo Mueller. They were German officials called upon to carry out specialized work in accordance with the orders of Hitler, and most of them were convinced that all they were doing was their duty, which frequently called for harshness and an iron will.
Mueller, who came to control and who built up this apparatus for Heydrich, will repeatedly appear by name in these pages. But we shall never meet him. He was the archetype of non-political functionary, in love with personal power and dedicated to the service of authority, the State. Although he was a high-ranking officer of the S.S. and had worked under Himmler from the moment he took office as Bavarian Chief of Police, it was not until 1939 that he joined the Party, and even then he took no stock in it. He worked anonymously, and he has left hardly a trace behind. We find his signature on orders authorizing the most atrocious deeds. We glimpse him once or twice in action, and are surprised to discover that this man without a shadow, this office bureaucrat, could walk about and use a gun. But we know nothing about him, neither where he came from nor where he went. Even his subordinate, Eichmann, the murderer of the Jews, who never on any account put his signature to a document, left behind friends and acquaintances who have given us vivid glimpses of the man. Mueller left nobody. We see him lunching at the Adlon Hotel with Heydrich, Nebe, Schellenberg, later with Kaltenbrunner. They are all dead. Even Willy Hoettl, who has things to say about most people, can tell us nothing about Mueller.
One of the few recorded interviews with him is given us by General Walter Dornberger, the chief of rocket research at Peenemuende. In his memoirs Dornberger shows a marked talent for describing the most varied personalities and making them live. But Mueller defeats him.
“He was the unobtrusive type of police official who leaves no personal impression on the memory. Later, all I could remember was a pair of piercing gray-blue eyes, fixed on me with an unwavering scrutiny. My first impression was one of cold curiosity and extreme reserve.”
And yet it was a critical meeting. Himmler had been interfering with the management of the Peenemuende station (this was in 1944), and Dornberger had gone to Berlin to demand the release of two of his men who had been arrested for no apparent reason at all. Mueller’s behavior indicated how deeply he had been impressed by his Soviet model. He heard Dornberger out, and then, without warning, instead of arguing, came back with a counter-attack:
“ ‘You are a very interesting case, General. Do you know what a fat file of evidence we have against you here?’
“I shook my head in surprise. He raised his hand a few inches above the table. I couldn’t help asking him, ‘Why don’t you arrest me then?’
“ ‘Because it would be pointless as yet. You are still regarded as our greatest rocket expert, and we can’t very well ask you to give expert evidence against yourself.’ ”
There was some desultory discussion of General Dornberger’s alleged negligence and sabotage, and that was that. The only time Mueller showed emotion at this interview was when Dornberger referred to the arrests as being carried out by the S.D. This upset the Chief of the Gestapo: “As a general on the active list you should surely know the difference between the S.D. and the Gestapo.” Dornberger retorted that nobody knew the difference. Mueller gulped, but said nothing.
He disappeared as silently as he arrived. We hear of him last in Hitler’s Bunker two days before the end. Professional as always, he had turned up in that madhouse on Hitler’s instructions to interrogate, as head of the Gestapo, the ex-riding-master Fegelein, the cousin of Eva Braun, and one of Himmler’s personal links with the Fuehrer’s inner circle. Fegelein had to be investigated because the news had just come to Hitler that Himmler had turned against him and was conspiring to usurp the leadership. It is characteristic of all we know of Mueller that he should not have been held compromised by the treason of his master.
Mueller did his job, while Berlin rocked, shuddered, and disintegrated under the Russian artillery and Hitler prepared himself for the end. Then, with Fegelein shot for a conspiracy with which he had nothing to do—Hitler’s last execution—the chief of the Gestapo vanishes, whether to die in the streets of Berlin, to escape under an assumed identity to Austria or Spain or the Argentine, or to join the Russians he admired so much, we do not know. Willy Hoettl believes that he did just that. For some time he had been using captured Russian agents to communicate false intelligence to the Soviet armies, using their own codes and their own wireless sets; and it would have been entirely possible for him to enter into detailed communication with the enemy by this means without anyone being the wiser. Be that as it may, like a perfect civil servant, he went, leaving not a trace, his files totally destroyed.