Heinrich Himmler : A Life (37 page)

In a dictatorship the head of the police is assessed above all on the basis of how far he succeeds in neutralizing actual or alleged opponents of the regime. Thus, on the one hand, he will try to demonstrate the existence of such opponents by preparing reports on the threat they pose and, on the other, continually seek to document how such opponents have successfully been eliminated. However, he faces a certain dilemma in having to achieve a satisfactory balance in the relationship between threat and repression. If opponents are combated too successfully then the threat will decline and the police chief will thereby undermine his position in the long term; but if he paints the threat in too dark colours and thus reveals that, despite the measures of persecution, the threat is not declining but actually increasing, then he will simply demonstrate his incompetence. It is thus essential for him to achieve the right degree of both threat and its successful repression.

Applied to Himmler’s position as Chief of the German Police in the 1930s, this process produced the following scenario: the Nazis’ main opponents were the communists. From 1933 onwards the reports of the Gestapo and SD documented a continual growth in the communist threat and, as a result, an increase in the combating of the communist movement. As was suggested above, however, this trend could not continue indefinitely if the security police did not wish to jeopardize its work; on the other hand, from its point of view an end to the communist threat could not be desirable because it would remove an essential basis for its very existence.

There were two possible ways of escaping from this dilemma: an expansion of the range of opponents and the conception of ‘preventive defence’. If the efforts of the security police were no longer concentrated primarily on defence against concrete threats and the exposure of acts of resistance that had already taken place, and instead focused on possible threats in the medium or long term, which could spring from a multiplicity of sources—or,
to put it another way, on fictional threats—then the success of the security apparatus would be freed from its fatal dependence on concrete dangers. The work of the security police could then be portrayed as the result of far-sighted planning. In other words, the success of prevention as a strategy depended primarily on how convincing the security police was in depicting the future dangers.

With Hitler’s fundamental agreement in the autumn of 1935 to his using a comprehensive concept of prevention as the basis for police work, Himmler had succeeded in taking the first step towards implementing this strategy. The transition to ‘general prevention’ then occurred on several levels.

In the first place, Himmler decided to reorientate the combating of the communist movement—explicitly in the light of a coming war—towards preventive measures, so that in future he could report both a reduction in communist activities and an increase in the number of communist prisoners. The combating of communism no longer needed to be justified in terms of communist acts of resistance, with the result that the embarrassment of repeated successes in this sphere being regarded in the final analysis as a sign of failure was avoided. The targets for this ‘preventive’ project were ‘the brains behind the operation’, ‘troublemakers’, and ‘intellectual initiators’; and, by associating communism with other ‘international’ enemies, the increased persecution of Jews and priests who were critical of the regime could be construed within the same uniform conception of prevention. However, the substantial halt to the campaign against the churches in 1937 resulted in the repression increasingly being concentrated on the Jewish minority.

Secondly, Himmler extended the preventive task of combating opponents to all forms of opposition, even those that were harmless and unspecific. The spreading of rumours and jokes, public demonstration of discontent with the regime, statements of loyalty to the Christian churches, and so on allegedly threatened the internal unity of the nation, and so the security police, as the protector of the national community, had to intervene.

Thirdly, Himmler integrated the combating of criminality into the work of the security police by representing criminality as essentially a consequence of biological defects, which must be—preventively—eliminated. Fourthly, he set the security police the task of focusing on the ‘national plagues’ of abortion and homosexuality in order to ensure the German people’s biological survival.

The transition to prevention resulted in a considerable extension and reorientation of traditional police work; in fact the police was integrated into a reformed apparatus of repression organized on the basis of a division of labour. The amalgamation of political repression and the combating of criminality was a logical consequence of the combination of the Gestapo and the criminal police (Kripo) to form the security police. While the restructured police continued to perform the executive functions as before, the provision of evidence of potential threats was primarily the task of the SD, which had intellectual ambitions and which was now closely linked with the state police. Moreover, the ideological indoctrination of the police, in particular the orientation of police work along biological lines, made the integration of SS and police appear sensible.

Thus Himmler succeeded in making the takeover of the whole of the police apparatus in 1936 appear not as a simple accumulation of power but as part of a much broader project, which involved a more far-reaching security concept: the amalgamation of the police and the SS. What Himmler envisaged was a state protection corps that would avert all potential threats to the nation and the ‘Aryan race’ as perceived by Nazi racial ideology.

On the occasion of his taking up his post as Chief of the German Police on 18 June 1936 Himmler made a speech in the courtyard of the Prussian Interior Ministry in which he justified the expansion of the police on the grounds of the need to be prepared for future conflicts with external enemies:

We are a country in the heart of Europe surrounded by open borders, surrounded by a world that is becoming more and more Bolshevized, and increasingly taken over by the Jew in his worst form, namely the tyranny of a totally destructive Bolshevism. To believe that this development is going to come to an end in a year’s time, or in several years or even in decades, is culpably reckless and erroneous. We must assume that this struggle will last for generations, for it’s the age-old struggle between humans and subhumans in its current new phase of the struggle between the Aryan peoples and Jewry and the organizational form Jewry has adopted of Bolshevism. I see my task as being to prepare the whole nation for this struggle by building up the police welded together with the order of the SS as the organization to protect the Reich at home just as the Wehrmacht provides protection against threats from abroad.
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This notion of Himmler’s, the German police ‘welded together with the order of the SS’, was then adopted by Werner Best in an influential article in
the journal of the Academy of German Law in order to explain that this concept of a ‘state protection corps’, which hitherto had been used for the amalgamation of the political police and the SS, had now acquired a new meaning. It now described the planned fusion of the SS and the whole of the police service.
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The point that was being unambiguously made was that Himmler’s appointment as Chief of the German Police did not mean that the Gestapo was being reintegrated into the general police apparatus but, on the contrary, marked the start of a development, in the course of which the police would be completely removed from the traditional administrative apparatus and be linked to the SS to form an entirely new type of ‘state protection corps’.

A few months later Himmler went a step further, and proposed the final departure of the police from the principle of legality. Whereas in previous years he, together with Heydrich and Best, had demanded and achieved a special status for the political police unrestricted by ‘legal norms’, he now demanded that this should apply to the whole of the police.

Significantly, he announced his fundamental opposition to—indeed contempt for—the principle of legality at the inaugural session of the Committee for Police Law. He conceded that this might ‘appear odd’, given that the location of the meeting was the Academy for German Law, but he was by no means inclined—‘you will appreciate that’—to make any concessions concerning his basic position, as became clear from his reminiscences about the first phase following the seizure of power: ‘We National Socialists then set to work [ . . . ] not without justice, but possibly outside the law. Right from the start I took the view that it did not matter in the least if our actions were contrary to some clause in the law; in my work for the Führer and the nation I do what my conscience tells me is right and what is common sense.’ Viewed from a völkisch standpoint, ‘in every nation there must be certain things that can only be seen in a certain way, and whether seen by a cowherd or a minister, it would not be decent to regard them in any other way’.

On this occasion Himmler put forward another idea: ‘We Germans,’ he said, because of the particular development of the country, ‘[have] become obsessed with making rules’, and ‘through our rule-making with its strict regulations and discipline [have] produced two types, the civil servant and the soldier’. But the German police could not be ‘simply civil servants or soldiers’; rather, they must develop ‘a soldierly civil service’. Himmler had already advocated this fusion of soldier and civil servant as a future model for
the Gestapo six months earlier in his speech to the Prussian state councillors in March. But now he gave this version a further twist. Himmler recommended the model of a soldierly civil service for the whole of the German police force. It would be ‘given more and more training—and that will be the work of generations—and one day will share the spirit of the SS, an un-civil service-like and un-soldierly organization, that has been created in the spirit of an order based on blood and promoting family inheritance and which must develop over centuries, even millennia’.
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In March 1937 Himmler once more expressed his views about the tasks of the police in public. The occasion was a publication to mark the sixtieth birthday of Interior Minister Frick, Himmler’s main opponent in his take-over of the police. Himmler used his article to stress once more, contrary to the views of Frick, who was rightly called by his biographer the ‘legalist of the unjust state’,
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that as a matter of principle the activities of the police could not be described or restricted by law.

In Himmler’s view, the police had to perform two main duties: ‘(a) the police must carry out the will of the leadership of the state and create and maintain the order that it wishes to establish. (b) The police must secure the German nation as an organic entity, its life force and its institutions, against destruction and subversion.’ The powers of a police force that was set such tasks ‘must not therefore be constrained by formal limits, because these limits would otherwise also stand in the way of it carrying out the tasks set by the state leadership’. Like the Wehrmacht, the police could act only on the orders of the leadership and not according to the law.

Himmler then dealt in detail with the functions of the order police (
Ordnungspolizei
) and security police (
Sicherheitspolizei
). While the first was mainly responsible for ‘maintaining public order’, the security police fundamentally had ‘the defensive task of averting attacks from all those forces which in any way might weaken or destroy the health, the life force, and the effectiveness of the nation and the state’. The criminal police must concentrate on those people ‘who, as a result of physical or intellectual degeneration, have removed themselves from the natural bonds of the national community and in the ruthless pursuit of their own personal interests have breached the regulations that have been instituted for the protection of the nation and the community’. The Secret State Police (
Geheime Staatspolizei
), on the other hand, was engaged in a ‘continual struggle’ against those who, ‘as tools of the ideological and political enemies of the German people, are trying to undermine the unity of the German nation and to destroy its state power’.
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Ill. 12.
Himmler addressing the Committee for Police Law. Among his attentive audience were (from l. to r.): Reinhard Heydrich, Hans Frank, Werner Best, and Kurt Daluege.

In his contribution to the celebratory volume Heydrich added an ‘offensive’ component to Himmler’s envisaged ‘defensive’ role for the police: ‘it has to be offensively investigating all opposition and combating it in order to pre-empt its destructive and subversive effects.’ In particular, Heydrich made a close link between conventional crime and ideological and political threats to the so-called Third Reich: ‘Subhumans threaten the health and life of the national body in two respects: as criminals they damage and undermine the community and they also act as tools and weapons for the plans of those powers hostile to the nation.’ According to Heydrich, ‘international, ideological, and intellectual opponents’ utilized ‘subhumanity, which is invariably bent on subversion and disorder, but also the supporters of their own political and ideological organizations, in other words Jewry, Freemasonry, and the politicized churches. Moreover, they utilize all those other groups in the German nation who, whether consciously or having been
misled, support special interests that are detrimental to the German people (Legitimists, etc.).’
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