Heinrich Himmler : A Life (38 page)

In this description of the role of the security police everything had been thrown together: the struggle against crime, against ‘subhumanity’, against any kind of disorder, against Jews, Freemasons, and the churches. All these unpleasant manifestations were to be ‘pre-emptively’ dealt with. It could hardly be clearer that the preventive policy of the new police leadership was directed against a conglomeration of enemies of the state of the most varied stripe that was impossible to disentangle, and that whoever had the authority to define these enemies and to pursue them would effectively have unlimited power. Himmler and Heydrich were ultimately able to secure their demand that the activities of the police should not be limited by law. No codification of police duties in a new police legal code was ever produced. Up until 1945 the legal basis for the measures carried out by the police remained the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933, which had suspended the fundamental rights of the Weimar Constitution. Thus the German police, which Himmler took over in 1936, acted under a permanent state of emergency.

In his public comments on the police at this time Himmler repeatedly emphasized the determination and ‘toughness’ of the Gestapo and the SS in dealing with enemies of the state. He admitted that this attitude had resulted in the SS being not exactly popular with the public, a fact that was not inconvenient for him, as it was, after all, part of a strategy of surrounding the Gestapo, SS, and concentration camps with an aura of terror. Already in November 1935 Himmler had admitted to the German Peasants’ Rally that he knew that ‘there are some people in Germany who feel sick when they see this black uniform; we understand that and do not expect that many people will like us. But all those whose hearts are true to Germany will and should respect us, and those who for some reason and at some time have a bad conscience about the Führer or the nation should fear us.’
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In a radio broadcast to mark German Police Day in January 1937 Himmler noted that he saw his main task as being ‘to neutralize all malign opponents and enemies of the National Socialist state. Whether the opponent is communist or reactionary is irrelevant.’ They would pursue ‘disciples of Moscow’ in just the same way as ‘incorrigible reactionaries’ or ‘religious malcontents’. He knew, Himmler continued, that ‘I and my colleagues have made a number of enemies as a result of the toughness with which we have carried out this task, and will go on making them. But I
am convinced that it’s better to be misunderstood by a few, to be hated by some opponents, but in the process to do what is necessary for Germany.’
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The picture painted by Himmler and leading SS functionaries of the police, and above all of the Gestapo, was sometimes underlined by such threatening gestures, but sometimes by the assurance that normal citizens had nothing to fear, that they would be treated fairly and justly, and, moreover, that the pursuit of opponents was being carried out in accordance with purely objective considerations. Himmler summed up this ambivalent public representation in his speech on the occasion of the 1937 German Police Day in the following formula: ‘tough and implacable where necessary, understanding and generous where possible.’
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Since 1933 the Nazi regime had made no secret of its belief in a police force, or rather a secret police, operating ruthlessly against political opponents and criminals. The initial emphasis of this propaganda had been on the need effectively to eliminate communist or ‘Marxist’ opponents. During the mid-1930s the emphasis shifted towards asserting that the police in general, and the security police in particular, provided comprehensive protection for the national community by suppressing any oppositional activity that was ‘hostile to the nation’, and through its preventive measures ensured that crime was nipped in the bud. It publicly advocated the notion of ‘police justice’, in other words, the regime’s practice of using the Gestapo to punish actual or alleged miscreants. At the same time, it tried to present the police as ‘a friend and helpmate’, as the official slogan put it, and to stress the high moral value of police work.

However, in numerous newspaper articles and publications, above all those marking German Police Day,
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which was celebrated annually from 1934 onwards and from 1937 lasted for a whole week, one theme was stressed above all: the notion of an ever-present and all-knowing secret police; in short, a Gestapo myth was created.
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According to Himmler, the police should show themselves to be ‘understanding and generous’, above all, as he put it in a speech to mark the 1937 German Police Day, because they had to rely on the ‘active and sympathetic support of every German national comrade’.
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He expressed his astonishment, however, at the extent of this ‘cooperation’ as it manifested itself in
the day-to-day operations of the police. Thus, in a speech on the Brocken
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to celebrate the summer solstice on 22 May 1936, he commented ‘that Germany is the biggest hotbed of gossip in the world. It’s sometimes really quite difficult to retain any respect for people when one keeps hearing how they denounce each other, how they keep making idiots of themselves. In Germany one doesn’t need to have any agents; the people do all the informing themselves.’
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Research into the Gestapo
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appears at first glance to confirm this picture of a society that kept watch on itself. Thus, in his study of the Düsseldorf Gestapo Reinhard Mann came to the conclusion that only 15 per cent of the cases that he examined
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had been initiated by the Gestapo itself, whereas at 26 per cent denunciations stemming from the population played a relatively large role. The American historian Eric A. Johnson also concluded that 24 per cent of cases taken up by the Gestapo in Krefeld were the result of denunciations.
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If one looks at the particular groups of offences, however, a rather more complex picture emerges. In the prosecution of cases of ‘racial disgrace’ (sexual relations between ‘Aryans’ and Jews) and other inadmissible contacts with Jews, as well as of so-called ‘unpatriotic behaviour’ (
Heimtücke
), in other words, the spreading of rumours, jokes, and so on, the number of denunciations was quite high, whereas in the case of the pursuit of political opponents, homosexuals, as well as supporters of the major Christian denominations and the Jehovah’s Witnesses they played a comparatively small role.
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It is also important to note, as Johnson points out, that denunciations mostly concerned minor offences, whereas in relation to ‘real’ opponents of the regime, in other words, cases which often had serious consequences, they were much less frequent. Above all, even if denunciations were of considerable importance for the day-to-day work of the Gestapo, in comparative terms the absolute numbers of cases of denunciation were relatively small. Thus, only a small percentage of the population volunteered information to the Gestapo. Such cases should not be used to draw more far-reaching conclusions about the state of ‘German society’.
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Thus, although the Gestapo was dependent on the ‘co-operation’ of the population in the pursuit of certain offences, such as the maintenance of contacts with Jews, it would be wrong simply to accept Himmler’s vision of a society where ‘the people do all the informing themselves’.

In relation to the tasks it had been set and its reputation, the Gestapo’s organization was relatively small. At the beginning of 1934 the Prussian Gestapo had approximately 1,700 employees, of whom around 700 were employed in the headquarters. In June 1935 the figure had risen to 2,700, with the number employed in headquarters remaining roughly the same. If one applies these figures to the Reich as a whole, then there were around 4,200 people employed in the political police in 1935, of whom around 10 per cent were female secretaries. Up until 1937 this number increased to around 7,000 employees.
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Of the Gestapo employees who were employed in 1937, around three-quarters had worked in various parts of the police force, 5 per cent had been taken on from other state organizations (such as the judicial system), and 20 per cent were newly employed, in other words, mainly party supporters.
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The size of the Gestapo varied significantly from government district to government district. Thus, in 1937 the Gestapo office in Bielefeld controlled a district of more than 870,000 inhabitants with fifty-three officers, the one in Hildesheim had thirty officers controlling around 600,000 people, and the one in Chemnitz had fifty-five officers responsible for more than a million inhabitants.
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However, one should not overlook the fact that the Gestapo had a relatively large number of informants. So-called ‘trusties’ headed a network of informants, which the Gestapo divided into various categories based on reliability and importance. Some of these informants were opponents who had been forced to cooperate with the regime, others were paid spies.
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In his new function Himmler unified the Gestapo apparatus throughout the Reich and gave it the same independence from the internal administration as he had already secured for it in Prussia. The heads of the Gestapo offices were supposed to act as ‘desk officers’ for political police matters for their state governments, and also to be bound by their instructions, but this applied only insofar as ‘instructions to the contrary had not been issued by the Secret State Police Office’. And where there was disagreement, the Gestapa had the final decision as to whether the head of the district Gestapo office should obey the instructions of his state government or not. This rendered the ‘inclusion’ of the Gestapo in the internal state administration an absurdity.
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The SD, as the party’s intelligence agency, was not directly affected by the takeover of the police by Himmler in June 1936 and the resultant reorganization. However, the fact that Heydrich, the head of the SD, was
put in charge of the newly created Security Main Office, which was responsible for the security police, increased his potential for influence, even if he was still not permitted to take executive action as head of the SD.
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At the beginning of 1936 Heydrich had already reorganized the SD Main Office within the SS headquarters. Most important was the fact that the tasks of the Office of Domestic Affairs had been divided into ‘ideological assessment’ (initially under Hermann Behrends, then under Franz Alfred Six) and ‘assessment of the domestic situation’ (under Reinhard Höhn, later under Otto Ohlendorff). While the ‘ideological assessment’ concentrated on those groups that were seen as the main enemies of Nazism and so were divided into the sections: ‘Freemasons’, ‘Jews’, ‘religious and political movements’,
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the ‘assessment of the domestic situation’ department set about constructing an elaborate system for information-gathering and reporting that went far beyond the surveillance of political opponents and was designed to cover the entire spectrum of life in the Third Reich. It was divided into three groups: Economics; Culture—Scholarship—Education—Ethnic issues; and Administration and the Law—Party and State—Higher Education and Students.

By issuing the so-called division-of-functions order, the ‘Combined Order for the Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS and for the Secret State Police of the Head of the Main Office of the Security Police and SD’, on 1 July 1937, Heydrich introduced a detailed demarcation of the functions of the two organizations.
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The SD, in which in the meantime young committed intellectuals had acquired leadership positions establishing valuable contacts to the world of scholarship, and in a number of cases achieving academic careers,
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was to be ‘exclusively’ responsible for the spheres of scholarship, ethnic matters and folklore, art, education, party and state, the constitution and administration, foreign affairs, Freemasonry, and clubs and societies; the Gestapo, on the other hand, was to be ‘exclusively’ responsible for ‘Marxism, treason, émigrés’. As far as the churches, pacifism, Jewry, the right-wing movement, other groups hostile to the state, the economy, and the press were concerned, all ‘general and fundamental issues were to be dealt with by the SD and all individual cases by the Gestapo’.

How, then, from 1936 onwards did the Gestapo carry out its role in practice? Statistics prepared by Reinhard Mann on the basis of the files of the Düsseldorf Gestapo for the whole period 1933 to 1945 show that 30 per cent of the cases investigated by the Gestapo concerned the pursuit of banned
organizations, mainly the KPD and SPD (although this area of Gestapo activity more or less came to a halt during the war); 29 per cent of cases investigated dealt with publicly deviant behaviour, mainly criticisms of the regime; 17 per cent with other forms of deviant behaviour, such as the spreading of banned pamphlets or listening to enemy radio broadcasts; 12 per cent of the investigations involved conventional criminality.
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In his study of the Düsseldorf office Johnson comes to the conclusion that the Gestapo’s activities concentrated on three groups in particular: Jews, members of the Left, as well as opposition priests and members of sects. The control of other ‘normal’ Germans, with the exception of homosexuals, was relatively lax, and if they ever got caught up in a Gestapo investigation they were usually let off with a warning or a minor penalty.
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As time went on, however, the focus of its activity shifted. While up until 1935–6 the pursuit of communists had been the first priority, in the following years this group played a much-reduced role, and for a very simple reason: by 1936 the communist underground organization had been almost completely destroyed.
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In 1935 the Gestapo had arrested around 14,000 communists, in 1936 11,678, and in 1938 8,068.
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Himmler, however, made no bones about the fact that he intended to continue keeping the communist functionaries in the camps. For, as he put it in 1937, even if the KPD and its organizations had ceased to exist, in future ‘a large number of members of our nation could keep becoming vulnerable to the poison of Bolshevism’.
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