Gestapo (25 page)

“In all other cases the prisoners are, in future, to be transported to Germany secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: (
a
) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace; (
b
) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

There followed instructions as to the reporting of cases for deportation to Germany directly to the Director of the Kripo at the R.S.H.A. in Berlin.

Six months later we have a letter from the Chief of Security Police and S.D. which goes over the old ground and emphasizes that the mystery surrounding
Nacht und Nebel
prisoners is to persist after their death:

“I therefore propose that the following rules be observed in the handling of cases of death:

“(a
) Notification of relatives is not to take place.

“(b
) The body will be buried at the place of decease in the Reich.

“(c
) The place of burial will, for the time being, not be made known.”

The Security Police in the Reich and all over Europe had absolute jurisdiction over the whole population. They could arrest. They could interrogate and torture. They
could arrange with summary military courts whether a death sentence was desirable or not. And, if it was not, the victims were deported to Germany and passed by the home-based Security Police to the concentration camps, where most of them died.

But it was not only over the civilian populations that the Security Police held this absolute sway. There were also categories of the Allied Armed Forces which had to be surrendered to them by the Wehrmacht. In every camp for Russian prisoners-of-war there was a small Gestapo screening-team whose job it was to comb out undesirables—i.e., “political, criminal, or in some other way intolerable elements among them.” Russian prisoners-of-war, like all others, were the responsibility of the Army. But it was laid down that the Security Police screening squads could in no way be interfered with and were the absolute arbiters of which prisoners should be taken away and executed. In a Gestapo directive of July 17th, 1941, the squads were told how to set about their task:

“The Commandos must make efforts from the beginning to seek out among the prisoners elements which would appear reliable, regardless of whether they are Communists or not, in order to use them for intelligence purposes inside the camp and, if advisable, later in the occupied territories also.

“By use of such informers and by use of all other existing possibilities, the discovery of all elements to be eliminated among the prisoners must proceed, step by step, at once. The Commandos must find out definitely in every case, by a short questioning of those reported and possibly by questioning other prisoners, what measures should be taken. The information of one informer is not sufficient to designate a camp inmate to be a suspect without further proof. It must be confirmed in some way, if possible.…”

These instructions give in a very convenient form a clear idea of the methods of the Gestapo everywhere. What they came to in practice was indicated by General Lahousen, not of the S.S., in his evidence for the Prosecution at Nuremberg. Lahousen belonged to the Military Intelligence organization, or
Abwehr
, of Admiral Canaris, who was
later executed for plotting against Hitler. Canaris and his
Abwehr
were at daggers drawn first with Heydrich, then with Kaltenbrunner and the Security Police in general; and this was not only because the Security Police and the S.D. in particular was constantly poaching on the preserves of Military Intelligence (in the end, after Canaris' execution, the S.D. took the whole outfit over, so that the German Army was unique in the world in having no Intelligence of its own) but also because Canaris and his friends were wholly revolted by the methods of the Security Police and the S.D. General Lahousen said:

“The prisoners were sorted out by commandos of the S.D. and according to peculiar and utterly arbitrary ways of procedure. Some of the leaders of these
Einsatzkommandos
were guided by racial considerations, particularly of course, if someone were a Jew or of Jewish type or could otherwise be classified as racially inferior, he was picked for execution. Other leaders of the
Einsatzkommandos
selected people according to their intelligence. Some had views all of their own and most peculiar, so that I felt compelled to ask Mueller: ‘Tell me, according to what principles does this selection take place? Do you determine it by the height of a person or the size of his shoes?' ”

(We are reminded of the notorious Gestapo round-ups in France, ostensibly to send Frenchmen to work in Germany, actually, as a rule, to consign them to concentration camps. “Certain German policemen were especially entrusted to pick out Jewish persons, according to their physiognomy. They called this group ‘The Physiognomists Brigade.' ”)

Sometimes the Russian victims of the Gestapo screening-operations were shot then and there—but some way from the camp. More frequently they were sent off to concentration camps, where they were executed or worked to death. It is worth recalling that the man in Berlin who directly supervised these activities was S.S. Colonel Kurt Lindow, the gentlemanly Gestapo man who gave evidence at the trial of Heinrich Baab, and was afterwards taken away.

Soviet prisoners-of-war were not the only ones to come into the hands of the Gestapo. On March 4th, 1944, Mueller
issued an instruction to the Security Police and the S.D. which became known as the
Kugel Erlass
, or Bullet Decree, which provided that certain categories of prisoners-of-war were “to be discharged from prisoner-of-war status” and handed over to the Secret State Police by the Army. These categories included all Soviet prisoners-of-war recaptured after escaping; all Soviet prisoners-of-war who refused to work, or were considered a bad influence on other prisoners; all Soviet prisoners-of-war screened by the Security Police (as described above); all Polish prisoners-of-war involved in sabotage. All prisoners-of-war of all nations except Britain and America, for whom a special order was made by the O.K.W.

This was called the Bullet Decree, because prisoners handed over to the Security Police and S.D. under its provisions for “special treatment” were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp and shot. As a rule the prisoners were taken directly to the “bathroom,” where they had to undress. The “bathroom” was used for gassing unwanted inmates of the concentration camp, and when there were many prisoners “for special treatment” they were gassed like so many civilians. But, as a rule, they were disposed of in what Major General Ohlendorf would doubtless have considered a more military manner. They were shot in the neck by a sort of humane killer; “the shooting took place by means of a measuring apparatus—the prisoner being backed towards a metrical measure with an automatic contraption releasing a bullet into his neck as soon as the moving plank determining his height touched the top of his head.”

British and American prisoners alone were unaffected by the Bullet Decree. But they too on occasion were liable to be “discharged from prisoner-of-war status” and handed over to the Gestapo. These included captured Commando Officers and men, who came under the provisions of the Commando Decree of October, 1942, and the fifty escapees from Stalag Luft III at Sagan, who were shot by the Gestapo on special orders from Hitler.

The notorious Commando Order was a no less blatant infringement of international law in general, and the Geneva Convention in particular, than the Bullet Decree. It was Hitler's personal response to the inconvenience caused by British Commando raids on the Atlantic Coast,
and it offers one more example of his obsession with terror as a deterrent. The gist of the matter was contained in paragraphs three and four of the original order.

“III. I therefore order that from now on all opponents engaged in so-called Commando operations in Europe or Africa, even when it is outwardly a matter of soldiers in uniform or demolition parties with or without weapons, are to be exterminated to the last man in battle or while in flight. In these cases it is immaterial whether they are landed for their operations by ship or airplane or descend by parachute. Even should these individuals, on their being discovered, make as if to surrender, all quarter is to be denied on principle.…

“IV. If individual members of such Commandos working as agents, saboteurs, etc., fall into the hands of the Wehrmacht by other means, such as through the police in any of the countries occupied by us, they are to be handed over to the S.D. immediately. It is strictly forbidden to hold them in military custody or in prisoner-of-war camps, even as a temporary measure.” Paragraph 6 showed that Hitler and Keitel were well aware of the opposition this order would arouse within the Wehrmacht.

“VI. In the case of non-compliance with this order, I shall bring to trial before a court-martial any commander or other officer who has either failed to carry out his duty in instructing the troops about this order or who has acted contrary to it.”

The only modification permitted was set out in a covering letter from the Fuehrer which stated: “… should it prove advisable to spare one or two men in the first instance for interrogation reasons, they are to be shot immediately afterwards.”

Thus from October, 1942, the Allied Commandos were up against not only the combined forces of the German Army, which was instructed to kill them to a man, but also, in the last resort, found themselves face to face with the Security Police and the S.D., whose methods we have been exploring. Sometimes they were shot on the spot; sometimes they were interrogated and then shot. Official instructions were that the cause of death should be recorded
as “killed in action.” On the other hand, there is evidence that some commanders did in fact disobey the order, in spite of Hitler's threat.

The fifty R.A.F. officers who escaped from Stalag Luft III were all said to have been shot while trying to escape. In fact, they were as a rule picked up by the Gestapo and then shot. The Security Police and the S.D. all had their orders direct from the R.S.H.A. in Berlin. One officer got as far as Alsace, across the whole width of Germany, before he was recaptured and taken to Strasbourg Gestapo H.Q. Berlin told Strasbourg what to do:

“The British prisoner-of-war who has been handed over to the Gestapo by the Strasbourg Criminal Police, by superior orders, is to be taken immediately in the direction of Breslau and to be shot
en route
while escaping. An undertaker is to be directed to remove the body to a crematorium and have it cremated there. The urn is to be sent to the head of the Criminal Police Headquarters R.S.H.A. The contents of this teleprint and the affair itself are to be made known only to the officials directly concerned with the carrying out of this matter, and they are to be pledged to secrecy by special handshake.…”

The procedure followed was that on the way to Natz-weiler concentration camp, where the cremation was to take place, the prisoner should be allowed to get out of the car to relieve himself, one member of his Gestapo escort was to hold him in conversation, while the other shot him from behind. This procedure was followed in other cases as well.

We seem to have come a long way from Berlin; but we have not. To this immense city in the heart of Europe, with its music, its theaters, its unquenchable pride, came the stream of teleprints and mimeographed reports of all that we have recorded, and a hundred times as much besides. From it went out the orders, meticulously detailed, condemning millions to unspeakable suffering and death.

Hitler is no longer there, in the spring of 1944: he lives with Keitel and his other friends underground at his field headquarters behind the Russian Front, cut off from all reality, a sick and exhausted shadow of himself, to all intents and purposes off his head. But his Generals, all but a handful of them, still obey him. Goering, the savage and the bold, the buccaneering figure, the only recognizable human type among all that gang, is in eclipse and will remain in eclipse until his impressive comeback in the dock at Nuremberg. The city is ruled in practice by Himmler, with Goebbels as a sort of cheer-leader.

Berlin is no longer the city it was. It has been badly knocked about already by the Allied bombing; but it is still a functioning city. The luxurious building in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse has been damaged, and some officials have had to find quarters elsewhere. Others work in rooms with the windows boarded up, and in basements. But it is still Gestapo H.Q.

Heydrich is dead. He had a remarkable career for a cashiered naval lieutenant, finishing up not only as head of the R.S.H.A. but also as an exalted Government functionary, Protector of Bohemia. He had the massacre at Lidice for a funeral pyre and Globocnik's
Aktion Reinhard
as a memorial; and he was recommended to posterity by Himmler in his funeral oration as “that good and radiant man.” Kaltenbrunner, his morose successor, who seems incapable of getting any real enjoyment from the exercise of unlimited power and the practice of unlimited murder, carries on. And since Kaltenbrunner's installation the old familiar atmosphere of intrigue has returned with a vengeance. There was no room for effective intrigue under Himmler and Heydrich: the only intrigue allowed was the plotting of the S.S. against the German Army and the world. But Himmler, now alone, rules over a divided house. Schellenberg, the brightest of Heydrich's bright young men, and chief of Amt VI of the R.S.H.A., the foreign branch of the S.D., had hoped to succeed his master, Heydrich, and so became Kaltenbrunner's bitter and ingenious enemy. This egregious young blond, who, at the end of the war, managed to dissociate himself from nearly everything, and, after a short time in prison, died in his bed in Rome,
was to have his triumph in the moment of his country's final disintegration.

When the Stauffenberg attempt failed and the whole apparatus of the elaborate plot against the Fuehrer was broken, and the only soldiers who had the courage and the decency to understand their duty were shot or slowly strangled, young Schellenberg achieved his life's ambition and won for the S.S. a total monopoly of all German Intelligence. It did not help. As supreme Intelligence Chief of the Reich, the man who had started the war by kidnapping Messrs. Best and Stevens finished it by conspiring with Himmler to persuade Count Folke Bernadotte to recommend the
Reichsfuehrer
S.S. to the Allies as a suitable person to do business with. At the same time Kaltenbrunner, his immediate superior, was using S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Willy Hoettl to talk to Mr. Allan Dulles with the same end in view. It seems never to have occurred to any of these remarkable characters that the Allies might not care for them.