Army of Evil: A History of the SS (21 page)

W
hen the NSDAP came to power in January 1933, Heydrich’s intelligence branch of the SS—the SD—consisted of about thirty paid agents scattered throughout Germany, as well as a few hundred unpaid collaborators within the political, governmental and state establishments. However, he moved swiftly to commission National Socialist lawyers and academics to represent the interests of the SS and SD within the state political police and to ensure that the political police operated within the framework of National Socialist ideology. Of course, this flies in the face of the popular perception of the SD as nothing more than a gang of radicals, thugs and faceless bureaucrats. Yet Michael Wildt has demonstrated
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that many of those at the very heart of the Third Reich’s security and intelligence apparatus came from the upper echelons of society: “well-educated academics, not part of a marginal or excluded minority, but members of the mainstream elite.”
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These were the men who were brought in to staff Heydrich’s organisation as it expanded throughout the 1930s. And it was they who ultimately orchestrated some of the worst crimes in history.

Between 1933 and 1934, the SD’s headquarters developed into five
major branches: I Organisation; II Administration; III Domestic Political Information (including intelligence collection within the National Socialist movement, religious movements, Marxist and socialist groups, science and education and the legal system); IV Counter-espionage and Overseas Intelligence; and V Freemasonry. Additionally, two “independent desks” monitored press activity and provided technical support for all SD operations.

Despite this impressive structure and a growing reputation within the National Socialist movement as an inscrutable and effective espionage system, Heydrich’s SD in fact remained an extraordinarily amateurish operation. Although Heydrich attracted a core of young, ambitious intellectuals into his organisation, none of them had any experience in intelligence collection or investigation. Outside the central headquarters, the SD’s structure mirrored that of the regional and local General-SS, and the local units were encouraged to recruit contacts throughout German society to report on what was happening within their particular spheres. This reflected Himmler and Heydrich’s conception of how the British Secret Service worked. They much admired this organisation and imagined it to be an informal network of high-minded, unpaid patriots who collected information out of a sense of duty to the state. But SD contacts were given vague and unfocused instructions on the type of information they should be collecting; and while SD headquarters accumulated impressive collections of Zionist books and Masonic artefacts, these were of little or no value for operational intelligence.

In fact, in its early days, the SD’s most effective personnel were members of the SD in name only; they were employed primarily within the Gestapo. These included Heinrich Müller—a detective from Munich whom Heydrich made operational chief of the Gestapo in 1934—and his Bavarian police colleagues Friedrich Panzinger, Franz Josef Huber and Josef Meisinger, all of whom had previously taken part in the Bavarian state’s monitoring of the National Socialists.
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Heydrich, though, was sufficiently realistic to understand that these men, with
their practical backgrounds in police investigations, would be much more effective than his own poorly trained and inexperienced intellectuals in uncovering enemies of the state.

Nevertheless, a number of Heydrich’s recruits went on to forge impressive careers within the SD and the Third Reich. Probably the most effective of them in the early days—and perhaps the best example of a highly intelligent and academically accomplished individual who was attracted by the SD—was Werner Best, a Hessian lawyer. He joined the SS in Hesse in 1931, and later that year he was working as a legal adviser to the Hesse National Socialist Party. In that capacity, he headed a team that drafted plans for a counter-revolution in the event of a communist seizure of power. Copies of these documents—known as the “Boxheim Papers” after the house where the team’s meetings were held—were seized by Hessian state authorities and became a source of much embarrassment to Hitler, who was attempting to persuade the German people that he would take power only by legal means.
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However, Best survived the scandal and was eventually installed as Heydrich’s Gestapo deputy in Munich.

On 30 January 1935, the SS-
Sicherheitshauptamt
(Security Main Office) was created as the third of the three original SS main offices—alongside the Main Office itself and the Race and Settlement Office. It had a central chancellery, a personnel branch, an administrative branch and a press office, as well as offices dealing with cultural information, enemies of National Socialist ideology; counter-espionage and counter-sabotage; and the dissemination of its findings. However, this organisational set-up proved to be short-lived, as Himmler, Heydrich and Kurt Daluege gained ever more control over the whole German police force.

As the senior police officer within the federal Ministry of the Interior, Daluege spent much of 1934 and 1935 purging the police of “undesirable elements”: social democrats, liberals and Catholics, as well as any SA officers who had been transferred into the police prior to the Night of the Long Knives. In their place, the SS sought to secure paid
police appointments for its members. This continued until 17 June 1936, when, after lengthy discussions, Wilhelm Frick appointed Himmler Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior. (Of course, he also retained his position as National Leader of the SS.) Less than two weeks later, Himmler created two new main offices within the ministry: the
Hauptamt Ordnungspolizei
(Order Police Main Office), headed by Daluege; and the
Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei
(Security Police Main Office), under Heydrich.
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Daluege now had command over all of Germany’s uniformed police. Eventually, this would include: the municipal police forces; the rural gendarmerie; the traffic police; coastguards; the railway police; the postal protection service; fire brigades; the air-raid service; the emergency technical service; the broadcasting police (who protected radio stations and investigated illicit reception of foreign broadcasts); the factory protection police; building regulations enforcement; the health police; and the commercial police. As Inspector of the Order Police, Daluege had the authority to appoint SS officers at state and provincial levels, and from March 1937 he could make appointments and set budgets at all levels, which allowed in-depth SS penetration of the police. Existing police officers were inducted into the SS with few formalities, and graduates of the SS officer schools at Braunschweig and Bad Tölz were given police assignments after graduation. It was not obligatory to be a member of the SS to succeed in the police, but it was commonly perceived that it would certainly not do any harm, so many police officers and NCOs chose to join.
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However, Himmler and the SS never enjoyed total control over the German police. The central lines of authority were clear enough, but at the local level the police remained subject to direction from provincial and city authorities. In practice, this meant that many policemen took their orders from local National Socialist Party leaders who had no particular loyalty to Himmler.

Heydrich’s main office created an entirely new organisation: the
Sicherheitspolizei
(Sipo—Security Police). On paper, this was the amalgamation of the Gestapo (which had effectively been a nationwide force since 1934) and Kripo (headed by Arthur Nebe), the detective branch of the Prussian Police, to which the detective branches of the other state police forces were now added. (Previously, Kripo had been considered part of the regular police, so it had been under the general authority of Daluege.
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) Sipo, like the Order Police, was a branch of the state, so, for the time being, it came under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior. But for members of the Gestapo and Kripo, much more so than for regular police officers, there were very clear career advantages to be gained from membership of the SS or the SD. Consequently, many hitherto apolitical career policemen signed up.

At this point, to avoid confusion with Sipo, the
Sicherheitshauptamt
once again became known officially as the
Sicherheitsdienst
. By now, this main office was consolidating its role as an intelligence clearinghouse and creating an organisational structure that would survive until the creation of the RSHA in 1939. Heydrich remained as chief, with SS-Brigadier Siegfried Taubert, an “old fighter,” as his chief of staff. Office I, under SS-Colonel Albert, was responsible for the administration and organisation of the SD, but it also included the “press and museum” department, headed by SS-Major Franz Six.

Six has sometimes been presented as an archetype of the ruthless intellectuals that Heydrich recruited into the SD, even though his academic qualifications were somewhat derided by his colleagues. Born in 1909, by the mid-1930s he was a clever young man in a hurry who had spotted the advantages of hitching himself to the National Socialist bandwagon. He gained his doctorate at Heidelberg University (supervised by an NSDAP professor) with a thesis entitled “The Political Structure as Represented in the Daily Press,” which was written in National Socialist jargon. He had been a party member since 1929, and had worked as a part-time journalist for various NSDAP newspapers while writing his thesis.
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As head of the press department, he created a system under which every newspaper and periodical that
might possibly contain something of interest was scrutinised and reviewed for information. Of course, this generated masses of press clippings. According to George Browder, “Six would boast that he converted the haphazard exploitation of the press into the most reliable intelligence source in the entire SD, superior to any reports coming up from the field posts.”
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In truth, “open source” press reporting is used by all intelligence agencies to supplement their confidential sources of information, so if this really was the best source of intelligence that the SD had at its disposal, it was failing in its mission.

Office II, “SD-
Inland
” (Home), was headed by SS-Colonel Hermann Behrends, a protégé of Heydrich who had acted as his representative in Berlin in the very early days of the Intelligence Service. This was subdivided into branches dealing with “Ideological Analysis” and the “Analysis of Spheres of Life.” The former focused on supposed ideological and political enemies of the National Socialist movement, and it was here that Adolf Eichmann began his work on the “final solution to the Jewish problem” by building up a detailed knowledge of German Zionist and assimilationist matters.
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The latter was headed by the academic SS-Major Reinhard Höhn. Its brief was to collect information on the cultural, community and material life of Germany. Thus, for example, the highly qualified economist Otto Ohlendorf began his SD career in the Spheres of Life branch as the “Food Economy” desk officer. He subsequently went on to lead the branch, commanded a special task group in Russia, and was a member of a group who secretly planned German currency reform and the creation of the Deutschmark, before finally being executed by the US Army.

Under Höhn and Ohlendorf, the Spheres of Life branch conducted regular, confidential public opinion surveys. The results were then circulated throughout the upper echelons of the SS and the National Socialist Party as
Meldungen aus dem Reich
(
Reports from the Reich
). These took the form of anecdotal reports collected by SD operatives, and they were intended to give a flavour of the public mood, particularly as the war dragged on, and the impact of domestic and foreign
propaganda on the population. A typical example from 1943 discussed the impact of bombing raids:

The reports pulled few punches, and over time they became deeply resented within party circles, where they were seen as proof that the SD was gathering evidence of impropriety and inefficiency in the NSDAP. Höhn, who had instigated them, was eventually forced to leave the SD because of pressure from senior party officials; and both Heydrich and Himmler were at pains to demonstrate that his successor, Ohlendorf, was on a very short leash.

Office III, SD-
Ausland
(Overseas), was nominally commanded by Heydrich, but his chief of staff was SS-Colonel Heinz Jost, a protégé of Best. Its two branches dealt with “Foreign Spheres of Life” and “Foreign Political Espionage and Counter-espionage.” It seems that this office devoted considerable time and resources into trying to gather information from overseas, but enjoyed very little success beyond acquiring material from open press sources and some German minority groups. Certainly, there is nothing to indicate that the SD had a network of agents outside Germany, nor even that its leaders had any idea of how such networks could be recruited and maintained.
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