Gestapo
EDWARD CRANKSHAW
Chapter 2 Himmler and the S.S.
Chapter 3 Heydrich and the S.D.
Chapter 4 Gestapo and Revolution
Chapter 5 Vendetta and Intrigue
Chapter 6 Confusion as a Fine Art
Chapter 7 The Totalitarian State
Chapter 10 The Dustbin of the Reich
Chapter 11 Streamlined Violence
Chapter 12 The Gestapo Goes to War
Chapter 13 Terror and Extermination
Chapter 15 Massacre in the East
Chapter 17 Night and Fog in the West
A remarkable feature of the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg was the striving of various counsel for the defense to saddle each other's clients with the blame. This was especially evident when it came to the “organizations” which found themselves on trial: the S.A., the S.S., the Gestapo, the General Staff. In fact, there was little else counsel could do: they were faced with a miserable task. The facts were there and could not be denied. The crimes had been committed and could not be talked out of existence. It could not be denied, for example, that concentration camps existed and that innumerable men and women from all over Europe had been tortured in them, or killed, or left to die of exhaustion and starvation; that there had been massacres of hostages and prisoners-of-war; that there had been a meticulously planned attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, children as well as adults, by gassing them to death. Cruelty and savagery unequaled in the history of modern Europe had been practiced on a scale unequaled in the history of the world. It had been uncovered by the Allies, described by the survivors, and freely confirmed in detail by a host of witnesses.
Counsel's only hope, each for himself, was to make out that his own client was blameless in these matters by pinning the responsibility on to another. Some of them pursued this line so stubbornly that anyone with patience and a twisted sense of humor could go through the verbatim reports of the major trials and prove that although all these things had been done, and more besides, they had been done without the knowledge of anybody at all in Germany except for a few men who were dead, or missing, and a handful of witnesses who, for one reason and another, found comfort in confessing to almost unimaginable crimes.
Several million people (prosecuting counsel put it at twelve million; but that figure has since been shown to have been a little too high) had been put to death in atrocious circumstances; several million men, women, and children from the heart of Europe had been put to death in the heart of Europe; and nobody knew who had done it, or even that it had been done. This display of blessed ignorance made no difference to the upshot of the trials; but it did cause a good deal of unnecessary confusion. And to this day most people do not know what really happened.
This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. The Germans, for reasons not plain to the outsider, regard themselves as being the most civilized race in the world. These things happened
in their midst and were carried out by them. Germany is a part of Western Europe: she has made notable contributions to the culture of Western Europe. But these things happened only a few years ago, and not far away on the steppes of Central Asia, but in our midst: in the midst of the new European community. It is important for us all to discover how, and why, and who was responsibleâif only to decide whether they could happen again, and whether they could happen outside Germany, and, if not, why not.
It is necessary to understand the nature of these crimes, which shows important differences from the nature of the crimes committed, for example, by Russians under Stalin. And it is necessary to have some idea of how they happened. Otherwise the verdict oscillates senselessly between the two extremes of untruth: on the one hand, that all Germans were directly responsible; on the other, that they were due solely to Hitler and a hard core of Nazi brutes.
There are many ways into this subject. I have chosen the history of the Gestapo because it offers an extreme example of that purposeful confusion which covered, like a smoke screen, the most terrible activities of the Third Reich. Very few people have a clear idea of what the Gestapo in fact was; and it has come to serve in Germany as a kind of universal scapegoat. Certainly the Gestapo stood behind the blackest deeds committed by Germans all over Europe and inspired and organized their execution. But it was essentially a small, compact, and highly professional corps which participated directly in only a part of the atrocities which horrified the world. The activities of the Gestapo, for example, ended more or less at the gates of the concentration camps. This fact will save us from the repetition of individual acts of sadism which, by first sickening the mind, then numbing it, could come between us and the object in view. At the same time, by establishing what the Gestapo did and what it did not do, we shall have a much clearer view of what was done by other organizations whose membership accounted for a very considerable proportion of the able-bodied population of Hitler's Germany and which sought, not always unsuccessfully, to saddle the Gestapo with their crimes.
The Gestapo is Born
Gestapo stands for
Geheime Staats Polizie
, or Secret State Police. The term was approved by Goering in April, 1933, two months after he had taken over the Prussian Police and purged it, replacing many of its career officials by trusted Nazis. In its origins the Gestapo was simply Department IA of the old Prussian Political Police uprooted from its home in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and transferred to a separate building, a commandeered art school in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, which was to become notorious. This was done so that it could be more easily kept apart from the Prussian State apparatus as a whole, which still included many anti-Nazis and “lukewarms.”
Goering first thought of calling his new department the G.P.A. (
Geheime Polizei Amt);
but it occurred to him that this was too much like the G.P.U., as the Soviet Political Police was then called. He need not have bothered. The term Gestapo, which might have been made especially for Sir (then Mr.) Winston Churchill, was the invention of a clerk in the Berlin Post Office, who simply needed an abbreviation for one more Government department. He did not know what he was starting. Nor, probably, did Goering.
For although the Gestapo was born in Berlin in 1933 and at first limited to Prussia, its real history begins in Munich. Those who think of the Gestapo as the creation of Heinrich Himmler are closer to the mark than the pedants, in spite of the fact that Himmler did not take it over from Goering until April, 1934. For the Prussian Gestapo in the first year of its existence was, in effect, very little more than Goering's personal terror squad, the real business of smashing popular opposition to the Hitler régime being left to the S.A. and the S.S. It was only when Himmler came to Berlin that the Gestapo developed into the elaborate and terrible machine which became the scourge of Germany and was then perfected as an instrument to terrorize the populations of conquered countries and to exterminate certain categories of human beings, above all Jews, who were considered unfit to live. The
beginning of this transformation coincided with the effective absorption of the Gestapo, a department of State administration, into the S.S., a purely Party organization, and its union under Reinhard Heydrich with the S.S. Security Service, the
Sicherheitsdienst
, or S.D. The Gestapo, as it was to become known to the world, took its tone and meaning from the S.D.âso much so that throughout this narrative Gestapo and S.D. will be treated as being inextricably connected. This, indeed, they were, the protestations of the defense counsel at Nuremberg notwithstanding.
Here, then, is the first source of confusion. The Gestapo in its final form was a product of the S.S. The S.S. in the end was five million strong. But the Gestapo in its heyday, when its mastery extended from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, was a strictly limited organization, never employing more than forty thousand individuals, including women and clerks. The S.D. had only three thousand and acted, insofar as its functions can be separated, as the long range Intelligence Service of the Gestapo.
These are facts which must be borne constantly in mind unless we are to lose ourselves in the confusion deliberately created by the Nazi leadership and so successfully exploited in the past.
Another relevant fact is the exceptional nature of the Gestapo. There had been a political police force in Prussia, as in other German states, during the days of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler came to power. Every government in the world relies in some degree on some kind of political police force to uncover conspiracy and protect the State from injury. The size and importance of such a force varies with the nature of the government: the wider the popular support for the government, the more insignificant the political police, and vice versa. In Victorian England, for example, the very idea of a political police force was remote from ordinary experience, and the majority of Englishmen would have said there was no such thing. Such a force did exist, nevertheless, its main duty being to keep an eye on the activities of exiles and refugees from less contented lands. In Russia, on the other hand, where most of the London exiles came from, the Government was neither
popular nor democratic, and the political police, the
Ochrana
, as it was then called, was a highly developed arm, as, under a variety of names, it has remained to this day.
The Government of the United Kingdom is still more popular than most; but it has to counter dangers undreamed of a century ago: there are citizens who place loyalty to a foreign power above loyalty to their own land; there are spies and traitors seeking to discover those unhappy secrets of applied science which may win a war. Thus the apparatus of vigilance, the political police, has had to be enlarged and strengthened. It consists now, in effect, of the Special Branch of Scotland Yard and a branch of Intelligence known as M.I.5.
It is fashionable among apologists for the Nazis to pretend that in principle the Gestapo differed in no way from M.I.5 in Britain or the F.B.I. in America. Nothing could be more false. The political police of Britain and America and a number of other countries exercise a purely defensive function, designed to uphold a
status quo
sanctioned by the people as a whole. The German Gestapo, on the other hand, was an instrument not of defense but of attack. The Gestapo was created by Goering to impose the will of Hitler upon his political opponents and his rivals within the Party. A year later it was captured by Himmler to be used as the spearhead in his grandiose campaign to establish with his S.S. thugs what amounted to a State within the State, and later to subdue the occupied territories and turn them into German colonies. Throughout its career it was an instrument of aggression.
There is one last fact which is commonly overlooked but which has a very direct bearing on the nature of the Gestapo: the extreme youth of the men who first frightened the German people into abject submission, and then went on to trample the flower of European culture. Himmler himself was only thirty-three when Hitler became Chancellor. Heydrich was twenty-nine. And so it went on through the whole apparatus of the S.S. These were the men who succeeded in breaking the spirit of the proud Army traditionâembodied in gray-haired military leaders of proved courage and distinction. Schellenberg of the S.D., when he seized on behalf of Himmler the whole apparatus of Military Intelligence, was only thirty-five. It is
impossible to obtain a clear image of the mood of those days unless it is borne constantly in mind that many of our heroes, men with resounding names and ranks, occupying positions of great responsibility and holding the power of life and death over millions, were in fact young toughs with fair hair of the kind that in England after the first world war gravitated naturally into the Black and Tans. In Germany they were called by Hitler to rule, and allowed by the nation to do so.