Army of Evil: A History of the SS (23 page)

Both the Gestapo and Kripo remained effective executive agencies, but their primary role was investigative policing, albeit within a totalitarian society in which merely being of an “undesirable” ethnicity, religious faith, political outlook or sexual orientation effectively rendered people criminals and liable to punishment. Müller remained head of the Gestapo until the very end of the war, and in this role he oversaw the activities of Eichmann and his Section IV B4 of the RSHA. This department was principally concerned with the transport and murder of the European Jews, as well as counter-espionage and counter-dissent activities.

One of the Gestapo’s major successes, in conjunction with the Abwehr, came in its operations against the Soviet
Rote Kapelle
(Red Orchestra) espionage ring. Its detective work and interrogations during the late summer of 1942 eventually led to 118 trials, after which 41 members of the ring were beheaded and 8 hanged.
³⁰
By contrast, the
Gestapo’s record against “serious” resistance in Germany was poor. Although it was aware of high-level opposition within the German political and military establishments—nicknamed the
Schwarze Kapelle
(Black Orchestra) by the Gestapo—the extent and intentions of these groups remained unknown until the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944.

The Gestapo even failed to unearth an opposition group within the SS itself. In May 1943,
³¹
the British Minister in Stockholm was approached by a young Waffen-SS officer named Hans Zech-Nenntwich, who claimed to be a deserter with important military information and a desire to fight against the National Socialist regime. After negotiations with the Swedish government, Zech-Nenntwich was flown across the North Sea in a Mosquito for interrogation. He had an extraordinary story to tell.

Born in 1916 in Silesia, he served as a pilot in the Condor Legion in Spain in 1937 and then wanted to become a police officer. However, in order to do this, he was obliged to join the SS-Special Purpose Troops. In 1939, he was attached to the
Heimwehr Danzig
for the invasion of Poland (see
Chapter 15
). Thereafter, he attended the Officer Cadet School at Bad Tölz and was then posted to SS-Mounted Regiment 1, later the nucleus of the SS-Cavalry Division. He served with the Cavalry Brigade throughout 1941 and 1942 before being wounded and withdrawn to the brigade’s convalescent battalion in Warsaw. In March 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo when trying to pass captured Russian weapons to the Polish underground movement. However, fellow Waffen-SS officers helped him escape, and he eventually managed to reach Sweden via Denmark.

More significant than any of this, though, was that Zech-Nenntwich claimed he was a member of an opposition group—the “League of Democratic Officers”—within the Waffen-SS. He said this group formed primarily as a result of the antagonism between the professional Waffen-SS officers produced by the officer schools and the “old fighters” who had been promoted above their ability purely because of
their political service. However, he also claimed that many of his colleagues were sickened by the atrocities being perpetrated against Jews in the East, and Zech-Nenntwich himself “was particularly revolted by the bestial treatment of the Poles by the Gestapo.”
³²
He concluded by naming forty-four members of this opposition group, and its leader—SS-Brigadier Wilhelm Bittrich.

It was never firmly established that this story of an opposition group within the SS was true. But, equally, British intelligence never found any evidence to disprove it, and Zech-Nenntwich was treated as a genuine defector. His personal anti–National Socialism certainly seemed sincere, and he spent the rest of the war making propaganda broadcasts and advising on the interrogation of SS prisoners of war. He was also never forgiven by the German establishment for his betrayal: he was harassed by the German government throughout the 1950s and was eventually put on trial and convicted in 1964 for his own role in atrocities against Jews in 1941. Imprisoned for four years’ hard labour in a German prison in Braunschweig, he managed simply to walk out, after bribing his guards, and fled to Egypt, although he did later return to serve his sentence.
³³

The Gestapo had more success in dealing with less well-organised resistance groups and individuals because so many ordinary Germans were willing to denounce their fellow countrymen. The fate of the
Weisse Rose
(White Rose) group from Munich University exemplifies this. It had six core members: the brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alex Schmorell and Willi Graf, all of whom were students, and Kurt Huber, who was a professor of philosophy. Between June 1942 and February 1943, the group printed and distributed six anonymous leaflets calling on Germans to oppose the National Socialist regime. On 18 February, while handing out their leaflets at the university, they were seen by a caretaker and promptly denounced to the police. The Scholls and Christoph Probst were tried, convicted and executed just four days later; Schmorell and Huber were executed on 13 July; Graf on 12 October.
³⁴

As far as foreign espionage was concerned, Office VI, SD-Overseas, achieved something of a coup in November 1939 when an operation led by Schellenberg and Naujocks kidnapped two British MI6 officers, Major Richard Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, at a café in Venlo on the German-Dutch border. Payne Best had been liaising with German anti–National Socialist refugees in the Netherlands for some time and believed that he was dealing with members of the German armed forces who were planning a coup. In fact, his contact was an agent provocateur inserted into German émigré circles by the SD. This agent persuaded Stevens and Payne Best to attend two meetings with a “Major Schaemmel,” supposedly an anti-NSDAP conspirator but actually Schellenberg. At their third meeting, on 9 November, they were ambushed by a team led by Naujocks and bundled across the border for interrogation. A Dutch intelligence officer, Major Klop, who was also at the meeting, was shot and fatally wounded during the ambush.

Payne Best and Stevens were taken to the Gestapo office in Düsseldorf. They were not allowed any contact with each other, and were interrogated at length and in detail. Stevens was the head of station for MI6 in the Hague, under the cover of being a “passport control officer.” However, he was a relatively new recruit to MI6 and had limited knowledge of the service’s agents and operations. On the other hand, Payne Best was a member of the “Z Organisation”—a parallel and supposedly more secretive network that MI6 operated in Europe under the personal control of Claude Dansey, a senior MI6 officer who had been working with Payne Best for the best part of twenty years. Both men eventually revealed extensive information under duress, and a summary of what they said about MI6 was circulated by the RSHA in early 1940. However, this may not have been the success it seems. When Schellenberg was interrogated after the war, he maintained that Payne Best and Stevens had disclosed little useful information, particularly about the leading personalities of the British Secret Service; and Schellenberg’s poor understanding of the
organisation of MI6 was a source of considerable amusement to British intelligence personnel.
³⁵

In fact, the post-war interrogation of Schellenberg and other Office VI personnel revealed that they never gathered significant information on British, Soviet or US capabilities or intentions.
³⁶
An attempt to insert agents into enemy territory was similarly unsuccessful. Office VI expended considerable effort in training and equipping two Irishmen and then parachuting them into the Irish Republic in December 1943. They had instructions to report on the naval, military and political situation in the UK, but they were arrested almost immediately, after details of their operation were uncovered by the “Ultra” intelligence-gathering system. This appears to have been Office VI’s only serious attempt to plant agents in Britain.
³⁷

H
EYDRICH CONTINUED AS
chief of the RSHA until 1942, but in September 1941 he was appointed acting
Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia and Moravia, a role that took up much of his time and energy. He adopted a largely successful carrot-and-stick approach to increase war production in the region, much to the dismay of Czech resistance groups.

In the spring of 1942, a team of Czech commandos trained in Britain by the Special Operations Executive was parachuted into Czechoslovakia with the task of eliminating Heydrich. The team’s reconnaissance work revealed that he drove from his residence to the Hradˇcany Castle in Prague every morning, and this seemed to be when he was at his most vulnerable. On 27 May, the four commandos, led by Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, struck. They set an ambush on a hairpin bend and waited for Heydrich to appear. When he did, Gabcik jumped into the middle of the road, raised his submachine gun and pulled the trigger. But the gun jammed. Heydrich’s car screeched to a halt and he pulled his pistol from its holster and opened fire. At that point, Kubis lobbed a grenade under the car. It detonated, but then, to
the Czechs’ astonishment, Heydrich emerged from the cloud of smoke, shouting and still shooting. A running battle developed as the commandos tried to escape from their athletic and apparently unharmed enemy. Kubis managed to slip between two passing trams and escape on a bicycle he had positioned nearby; but Gabcik seemed to be in real danger of being caught. However, Heydrich suddenly reached for his stomach, threw down his pistol and slumped to the ground. His driver, who had been slightly wounded in the blast, commandeered a passing bread van and took Heydrich to the nearest German military hospital. It was discovered that Heydrich had multiple shrapnel wounds, and he deteriorated over the next few days, despite being treated by Germany’s leading doctors. He died on 4 June from septicaemia, aged thirty-eight.
³⁸

Daluege replaced Heydrich as acting
Reichsprotektor
and initiated a wave of terror against the Czech population in revenge for his predecessor’s assassination. This culminated in the destruction of the village of Lidice on 9 June, when all 198 adult male inhabitants were shot, all the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and every child was taken to Germany for adoption. Daluege stepped down from the Czech role in August 1943 after suffering a serious illness that also forced him to hand over control of the Order Police Main Office to his deputy, Alfred Wunnenberg, a professional police officer.
³⁹

Himmler himself had become chief of the RSHA in the wake of Heydrich’s death, but he handed over day-to-day responsibility to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, hitherto Senior SS and Police Leader Danube, based in Vienna. Kaltenbrunner, an Austrian lawyer and longtime member of the SS, assumed full leadership of the RSHA in January 1943 and held the post until the end of the war. But his relationship with Himmler was never as close as Heydrich’s had been, and he enjoyed far less independence than his predecessor. Where Heydrich had been an active pioneer, working closely with Himmler to expand and develop the role of the SS in intelligence, security and policing, and
later organising the murderous special task groups in occupied Europe, Kaltenbrunner was an apparatchik who was only really interested in securing his own position. He achieved this through the political infighting that characterised the upper reaches of the National Socialist state, especially towards the end of the war.
⁴⁰

*
They typically became unpaid members of a local General-SS or SD unit.

*
Most accounts (e.g., Höhne,
The Order of the Death’s Head
) suggest that the attack at Gleiwitz took place at the end of August and that it was a more or less unique attempt to give Hitler a
casus belli
. But in his interrogation in late 1944, Naujocks clearly indicated that his was one of several attacks, and that it took place in mid-August at the latest.

*
However, the Abwehr itself was no more than adequate as an intelligence-collection organisation, primarily for structural reasons. The National Socialist state lacked a central intelligence coordinating body comparable to Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, which meant that the Abwehr often lacked direction in its intelligence collection. Moreover, any material it did collect was not necessarily collated with that retrieved by other agencies, including the RSHA.