Army of Evil: A History of the SS (22 page)

On the other hand, Office III did provide Heydrich with a few officers whom he used for “cloak-and-dagger” operations outside Germany. The best known of these was Alfred Naujocks,
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a young mechanic who had joined the SS in his native Kiel in 1931. Three years
later, he escaped domestic difficulties with his wife by signing on for a full-time SS role as a driver in SD-Regional Command East in Berlin, which at that time was commanded by Behrends. Then he became a clerk in the central registry. However, before long, for reasons that are not clear, Heydrich started to entrust Naujocks with special foreign missions. For instance, in October or November 1934, he sent him and another SD man to Prague to assassinate Otto Strasser. But after spending fourteen days in the city, they became concerned by Czech Police interest in them and returned to Berlin. Then, in February 1935, Naujocks and his colleague were again sent to Czechoslovakia, this time to kidnap a Strasser supporter who was broadcasting propaganda into southern Germany. They found their target but killed him in a gunfight, during which Naujocks was also wounded.
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In spite of this inauspicious start to Naujocks’ covert career, for some reason Heydrich continued to select him for clandestine missions. In 1936 and 1937, he was sent on a tour of Europe to familiarise himself with all the major cities, including Istanbul, Ankara, Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest, Athens, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Paris and London. Naujocks was accompanied on these trips by another SS man who worked for the industrial giant AEG, which afforded them some degree of cover. The two men stayed in the better hotels at the SD’s expense and usually made contact with either AEG or German diplomatic staff. However, they made no attempt to gather information, and Naujocks regarded the trips as purely pleasurable.

By the autumn of 1937, Naujocks had been promoted to SS-captain and assigned to Office III. This was considered a prestigious posting, and Heydrich introduced him to several significant figures in the regime, including Himmler, Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Goebbels. In early 1938, Naujocks became an SS-major and was made chief of the South-East Europe section of Office III. This new position gave him a good overview of how the SD attempted to collect foreign intelligence: “He relied on reports submitted by German businessmen who travelled extensively in the countries concerned. They were not paid,
but were enthusiastic National Socialists who prepared their reports on ideological grounds and expected no recompense for them.”
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In early 1939, Heydrich called Naujocks into his office to discuss a Propaganda Ministry official named Berndt who had evidently offended Heydrich in some way. According to Naujocks, Heydrich did not specifically order him to kill Berndt, but he did suggest that he should arrest the man with a drawn revolver and should use it at the first opportunity. However, Naujocks refused to carry out the mission; instead, he took to his bed, claiming illness. Heydrich was less than impressed, and Jost told Naujocks that he would be well advised to find a way out of the SD as soon as possible. He stayed in his post, though, and throughout the first half of 1939 was involved in a minor way in the haggling over the future of Slovakia, following the German dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
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On 10 August, he was given the mission for which he is probably the best known: staging a fake attack on the German-Polish border. Heydrich informed Naujocks that his and other bogus attacks were needed to give Hitler a pretext to launch his planned offensive against Poland. Heydrich’s plan was to gather a number of “life-sentence” prisoners from concentration camps, kill them with a lethal injection, dress them in Polish uniforms, riddle them with bullets and then dump them at various locations along the border. The idea was that this would lead the world to believe that Polish soldiers had been making cross-border raids into Germany.

After he defected to the Allies in 1944, Naujocks claimed that his part in this, an attack on Gleiwitz’s radio station in Upper Silesia, was just one of a number of such operations that took place throughout August:
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“Naujocks states that the bodies were forwarded to the villages
where they were required in packing cases labelled ‘preserves.’ Some of the victims arrived at their destinations only half-dead, having been given inadequate injections, and these had to be put out of their misery before they could be used.”
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On Naujocks’ arrival in Gleiwitz, with a team of

Naujocks remained in Gleiwitz for more than a fortnight after this operation, and it was only when he travelled back to Berlin, passing vast numbers of German troops and equipment going in the opposite direction, that he realised war was imminent.

Dramatic as these operations doubtless were, they represent a schoolboy version of what constitutes “intelligence” work and reflect the essential amateurism of Heydrich and his subordinates. While the SD could boast many young, ruthless, highly intelligent academics, it also included more than a few semi-educated bumblers like Naujocks. But all of these men shared a poor understanding of how to obtain and report useful intelligence against real enemies. Consequently, they were rarely, if ever, able to fulfil their designated role.

I
N
N
OVEMBER 1937
, a further step was quietly undertaken towards the integration of the SS and the police. This was the creation of the role of
Höhere SS und Polizei Führer
(HSSPF—Senior SS and Police Leader), a “shadow” appointment that became effective only upon mobilisation of Germany’s armed forces. All HSSPFs were nominated
personally by Himmler and answered directly to him (though, in practice, they were generally the regional SS commanders). Their task was to oversee the activities of SS and police units (from both the Order Police and Sipo) within their areas and to coordinate them with the civil and military authorities. Geographically, within Germany, the HSSPFs’ areas of responsibility were congruous with the military districts of the armed forces, although their political equivalents were the regional leaders—the local National Socialist Party leaders appointed personally by Hitler. Once Germany had begun to acquire occupied territories, further HSSPFs were created to work in combination with the occupation authorities, be they military or civil.
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Although their role was not widely publicised before the war, the HSSPFs were theoretically immensely powerful. As Himmler’s personal representatives, they were entitled to override directives from the SS main offices and, in an emergency, were permitted to take operational control of all police, SS and even military units in their areas of responsibility.

The major consolidation within the police and intelligence system of the SS occurred on 27 September 1939, when Heydrich’s two main offices, the SD-Main Office and the Security Police Main Office, were amalgamated to create the
Reichsicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA—Reich Security Main Office).
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This was the conclusion of months of discussions that had debated the future of the SD. Those attending these meetings had been concerned that the organisation had several “faces.” First, it was an umbrella organisation through which Gestapo and Kripo detectives could acquire SS membership, rank and uniform, while demonstrating commitment to the regime. Second, it was a network of collaborators, contacts and information sources throughout German society. Third, it was a system of regional offices associated with General-SS area commands. Fourth, and most problematically, it was the central SD-Main Office.

There were two main issues regarding the SD-Main Office. First, in order to rationalise and streamline the system, the Gestapo had
been made the sole state security investigative agency back in 1937, which meant the SD could no longer conduct investigations or make arrests in Germany. Moreover, while it could and did conduct operations abroad, these were crude, poorly focused, and far less effective than the missions carried out by the Abwehr, the armed forces’ intelligence service, headed by Canaris.
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This meant that there was a credibility gap between the largely professional Sipo and the amateurish SD. Second, the SD was a party formation, not a state agency, so it was still funded by the NSDAP. The merger proposals, which were drafted by Walter Schellenberg, a highly intelligent young lawyer who had joined the SS in 1933 and had enjoyed a meteoric rise as a protégé of Heydrich, sought to bring the SD within the state fold and ensure that it could be adequately resourced.
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Ultimately, the structure of the new RSHA was a compromise. Some of the administrative elements of the SD-Main Office merged with their Sipo counterparts and became state agencies, but the two main branches of the SD that survived the merger, “Home” and “Overseas,” remained party formations and therefore dependent on funding from the NSDAP treasury. Thus, the structure of the RSHA was a straightforward amalgamation of the earlier main offices, in which administrative and budgetary functions were combined: Office I covered legal and administrative issues, under the leadership of Best; Office II dealt with “ideological investigation,” under Six; Office III was SD-Home, now under Ohlendorf; Office IV was the Gestapo, under Müller; Office V was Kripo, under Nebe; and Office VI was SD-Overseas, under Jost. Best also became Heydrich’s deputy chief for the whole RSHA.
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The creation of the RSHA as a central coordinating body was not
widely broadcast, and for public purposes, the distinction between the state function of the Sipo and the party functions of the SD were maintained, with Heydrich continuing to be referred to as “Chief of the
Sicherheitspolizei
and SD.”
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The most striking aspect of the RSHA was its personnel. Between 1925 and 1930, the typical SS member was an ex-soldier who could display a higher level of commitment and loyalty to the party and its leadership than a counterpart in the SA, for example. But as the NSDAP became more established and grew in popularity, the SS began to attract a different type of recruit: talented, well-educated individuals like Heydrich and Best who saw the party as the future government of Germany, and saw the potential of the SS’s role as a security elite at the heart of the movement. Once the NSDAP did indeed come to power, this change became even more evident.

In his study of the leadership corps within the RSHA, Wildt has shown that it attracted a remarkable group of young National Socialist Germans. He studied 221 individuals holding senior positions in the organisation: 77 per cent were born after 1900; two-thirds had a university degree; and 50 per cent of these graduates also had doctorates.
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Most of them came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, and most were the first members of their families to have attended university.

Interestingly, many of these men had been activists within the National Socialist Student Federation while at university,
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indicating that they did not join the SS and later the RSHA merely through careerist opportunism. Rather, it seems they wanted to work within an organisation that was in the ideological vanguard of National Socialism because they were firmly committed to that ideology. So, when the time came for the RSHA to take a leading role in the attempted extermination of the Jews of Europe, they remained unflinching in their dedication to both the party leadership and the project itself.

Nevertheless, the leading intellectual within the RSHA did not last long as either chief of Office I or Heydrich’s deputy. Although
Best had been instrumental in framing the ideological and legal framework in which the SS operated between 1934 and 1939, Heydrich came to realise that he was a poor practical operator. He was a committed National Socialist but remained a lawyer at heart, and as such he always tried to work within the bounds of the law. By contrast, Heydrich sought practical solutions and was not concerned by legal niceties.
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In 1940, Best left the RSHA and his office was split in two:
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Office I was now concerned with personnel training and organisation; Office II was the administration and legal branch. (The old Office II—Six’s “ideological investigations” branch—became Office VII in the reshuffle.
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)

This final organisational structure remained in place throughout the remainder of the war. In practice, though, the importance and output of both Office III and Office VII diminished rapidly as the war continued. As we have seen, SD-Home’s unvarnished reporting of public opinion became unpopular and controversial, and Ohlendorf had little freedom of operation. Meanwhile, the ambitious Six was intended to be the repository for all information relating to enemies of National Socialism, and it was assumed that his office would underpin much of the future work of the RSHA. Himmler, in typical grandiose style, described Office VII as: “The ‘Defenders of the Grail’ of the Third Reich.”
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However, it proved to be no such thing. During the early years of the war, Office VII recruits were dispatched to the occupied territories to gather as much information as they could. But the department lacked the capacity to evaluate it; and, in any case, much of what was collected was of purely academic or historical interest. Six soon lost interest in his own department, and after service at the front with the Waffen-SS in 1940 he tried to find himself a niche within the Foreign Office. In his place, SS-
Obersturmbannführer
(Lieutenant Colonel) Paul Dittel, an academic expert on Freemasonry, became
acting head of the department. However, he also found much of its work futile and its staff far below the level he had expected: “Office VII was, for the most part, a typical collection of semi-intellectuals…mostly old members of the National Socialist Party, including university failures, some minor officials and quite a number of simple tradesmen.”
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If desk officers did ever display academic rigour, their efforts were generally not welcomed. Investigations by Office VII into the authenticity of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” (a hoax first published in 1903 concerning a purported Jewish plot to take over the world), the “disastrous” and “destructive” Catholic Church, and the “subversive” character of witchcraft
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reached conclusions that were completely at odds with the prejudices of Himmler and were duly criticised for “over-objectivity.”
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By the end of 1943, Office VII was little more than a haven for SD personnel seeking to avoid service at the front.