SS und Polizei: Myths and Lies of Hitler's SS and Police

by J. Lee Ready

  Hitler’s attention to women helped him significantly. The fact that he was a bachelor, still only 43, and in the style of the day was considered handsome did not hurt him. In truth he always had a much higher support base among females than among males.

  Hitler said he wanted to establish the Third Reich. The First Reich was the Christian Holy Roman Empire in Germany in the Middle Ages. The Second Reich was the period 1871-1918. To call his vision for Germany the Third Reich was frankly meaningless, but it sounded noble to Hitler. This appeal to nostalgia and history undoubtedly gained him some votes.

  Hitler’s real political message, that the nation had a right to break free of the Versailles Treaty, and that his program of expansion would guarantee every man a job made sense to many Germans, but his blatant and rabid anti-Semitism turned off a lot of Germans. His attempt to actually equate all Jews with the Communists did not hold water, though it was true that an extraordinarily high number of ranking Communists were Jews, but nonetheless even a dunce knew that a Jewish banker and a Jewish Communist were enemies. In any case Jews made up less than one per cent of the population and they were fully assimilated. Most Germans never knew a Jew, or if they did they did not know it. Those who did know Jewish people got along well with them. Indeed Germany was a popular destination for Eastern European Jews who wished to seek their fortune in a free society. If five stars represented racism at its least, and one star at its worst, then in the early 1930s Britain would have had five stars, but only two stars within her empire. Australia would have had four stars, as would Canada, and the USA would have had four stars in the north and west of that country, but only two stars in its southeast, whereas Germany would have had five stars. Hitler, who grew up in Austria, where racism was much more prevalent than Germany, often complained that ‘every German has his one good Jew’.

  Unfortunately many Germans, Jews included, believed that Hitler’s hate mongering against Jews was just so much political hot air.

  A much greater reason for the public disgust with the Nazis was the antics of the SA. Most Germans looked upon these stormtroopers as repugnant brutal bullies, who expected people to doff their hats to them in the street. However, the Germans did not associate Hitler with them. This is evident in that while over a third of German voters chose Hitler for president in 1932, in November of that year in the Reichstag election the Nazis actually dropped their percentage of seats, to 33.1%.

  Indeed the gap between Hitler and the Nazis was widening. This was not unexpected. In Italy most people loved Mussolini, but did not like his fascists, and hated his Blackshirts most of all. Gregor Strasser, Himmler’s old boss, even got into a public shouting match with Hitler, accusing him of losing ground for the party. Hitler responded by calling Strasser a traitor. Heydrich, peering from the sidelines, no doubt made a personal note of the Strasser-Hitler rift.

  While the chasm was widening between the SA and the Nazis and Hitler, the relationship between the Nazis and the SS was welding together in a symbiotic manner.

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  Chapter Three

  IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE

  By late 1932 the Nazis still retained many seats in the Reichstag and they now proceeded to boycott every vote that was not to their liking or relevant to them, thus disrupting normal procedure and making it impossible for the parliament to go about its business.

  President von Hindenburg was at a loss as to how to bring the nation out of economic depression, how to stop the political street violence and how to get the Reichstag moving again. Gun battles between the various Red Guard militias [Communist] on one side and the Stahlhelm [German National People’s Party] and SA [Nazi Party] on the other side were commonplace. Taking advice that Hitler would be less dangerous within the government than he was outside it, in frustration on 30 January 1933 von Hindenburg asked Hitler to become Chancellor and to run the country, subject to a national vote. Hitler accepted, despite knowing he would have his hands tied by laws and protocols. Von Hindenburg naively believed he could control Hitler, but in fact he had asked the wolf to guard the chickens. Thus while Hindenburg would be head of state, Hitler would be head of government.

  Himmler was publicly happy at the news, but inwardly afraid. He knew there was a risk that Hitler would exchange his SS LAH [bodyguard troops] for regular German soldiers or police, now that he was the nation’s chancellor, and disband the SS LAH, and possibly the entire SS. After all, Hitler looked up to Mussolini, and when that Italian had become prime minister of Italy he had immediately emasculated his Blackshirts. Would Hitler follow his idol’s lead? Himmler soon breathed a sigh of relief when Hitler asked the SS to remain, this time with official government sanction. In fact he soon secretly informed Himmler that he had been planning a coup at the very moment he swore the oath to protect the nation and its constitution, and that he still intended to carry out this revolution.

  Goering was feeling his oats He had already become Minister of the Interior for Prussia, the largest state in the nation, and just twenty-six days into Hitler’s chancellorship and eight days before the election that would confirm or deny Hitler’s appointment, Goering jumped the gun and gave auxiliary police status to thousands of members of the SA, including the SS, and to members of the Stahlhelm, which was the militia of the German National People’s Party. This status was effective only in Prussia, but that included Berlin, the national capital. In other words Prussian police had to treat these members as if they were fellow cops.

  Himmler had already become police chief in some jurisdictions, and thus the SS-police link had begun, but with Goering’s order the SS itself became a police force - at least in Prussia.

  Up until now the police had tried to keep a lid on SA rowdyism, but now the bullyboys were untouchable in Prussia, and they set out to ensure the Nazis would win the election, and there was no subtlety in their methods. Furthermore Goering put his own man, Rudolf Diels, in charge of that department of the Prussian state police that investigated political crimes, an organization known as the Geheimstaatspolizei or Gestapo [aka Gestapa]. Furthermore Goering appointed another of his cronies Kurt Daluege to head the Berlin police.

  Himmler, who had longingly lusted after the top police job in Prussia for himself, was not too unhappy by these appointments, for Daluege was already in the SS reserves and Diels was an honorary SS member. And Himmler believed these two were more loyal to him than to Goering.

  Then just two days later a young Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, set fire to the Reichstag building in Berlin. In truth he may have been set up to take the fall by SD agents pretending to be fellow Communists. Certainly his fire making skills would have been ineffective on their own, merely singeing a few walls. Were other more skilled arsonists at work: SD agents? And was Heydrich directing them himself? He just happened to be visiting Berlin at the time. The resulting fire gutted the massive structure. No doubt Heydrich was ably assisted by Untersturmfuehrer Hans von Kobelinski, commander of the Berlin SD. There is no true evidence that the SD did this, but a mountain of circumstantial evidence points to it. E.g. Himmler promoted both Heydrich and Kobelinski right after the fire.

  Whether or not Lubbe was guilty, Hitler seized the moment, asking President von Hindenburg for special powers, claiming the nation was in danger. The aged president, who may well have been descending into senility at this time, complied, and Hitler gave auxiliary police status to the entire SA, which included the SS, throughout the nation. Suddenly mobs of roaming stormtroopers could do as they wished and the police were forced to look the other way. Moreover policemen were now expected to respect the rank structure of the SA and the SS. In other words a policeman had to obey an order from a superior officer even if that officer was SS not police. This was important in a country where all uniformed personnel saluted each other daily as if they were soldiers.

  Though the stormtroopers were not called upon to do any real police work, the SA formed a full-time permanent auxiliary police formation known as the SA Feldjaeger
korps.

  On 5 March 1933 Hitler’s Nazis won the election with 44% of the vote. Their opponents outnumbered them, but were disunited, so only Hitler could form a government.

  On March 24 the members of the German Reichstag, meeting in another building, passed the Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers. Four days later Hitler received approval from the Roman Catholic Church, which gave its permission for Catholics to support the Nazis. This was quite an important victory for Hitler, as most residents of the Rhineland and Bavaria were Catholic. The main Protestant churches soon fell into line, too. In the 1930s many Germans relied on moral guidance from their religious leaders rather than their own conscience, and with the churches in his pocket, Hitler could now expect compliance from almost all Germans.

  Not all clergymen were happy with this agreement. When Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed anti-Nazi sentiments his superiors of the Evangelical Church transferred him to a church in Britain. The Evangelical Church was a loose union of several Protestant churches, mostly Lutheran. In fact shortly after this a group of pastors of the Evangelical Church broke away, rather than toe the Nazi party line, and they formed the Confessing Church led by Pastor Martin Niemoller. Bonhoeffer joined.

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  Thus the SS/police relationship had begun in earnest. Not only did many of the early recruits to the SS come from the police, men such as Diels, Daluege, Dietrich, Kurt Meyer, Nebe and Eicke, but also as of March 1933 all SS men had the status of auxiliary police and theoretically could arrest anyone. The reverse process, by which SS men would be given top police jobs, would continue, so that increasingly the distinction between the police and the SS would blur. E.g. Himmler appointed SS Oberfuehrer Wilhelm Rediess [an agriculturalist like himself] to chief of the Wiesbaden police. He had been in command of the Allgemeine SS in that town. Karl Zech a mining engineer and reservist SS oberfuehrer was made chief of the Essen police. Himmler thought Standartenfuehrer Heinrich von Dolega-Kozierowski would make a good police chief for Wilhelmshafen. After all he was a farmer.

  As soon as the Enabling Act was passed the SA went into action. In every town the local SA had lists of their enemies: Jewish community leaders, Communist politicians, Jehovah’s Witness leaders, high-ranking freemasons, Socialist leaders, trade union bosses, outspoken critics of the Nazis, and sometimes people whose names were on the list because of a personal feud with a Nazi, such as a business disagreement or a rival in love. SA stormtroopers now went from door to door arresting thousands of people on their lists. At first they imprisoned them in jails or vacant buildings, but within days they began to erect concentration camps where members of the prison service and SA stormtroopers would guard the newly arrested ‘criminals’.

  Goering also ordered a concentration camp to be built at Oranienburg under the control of his Gestapo.

  Himmler was eager to catch a piece of this cake too, for it galled him that the SS still had to take orders from the SA leadership. He had managed to bribe and extort his way to the top job in the Bavaria State Police, and one of his first orders was to appoint Heydrich to head the political department of that force. Despite his new job Heydrich would retain control of the SD. Himmler chose another SS officer, Philipp Bouhler, to be chief of police in Munich, the Bavarian capital. Himmler also encouraged senior police officials to join the SS, but most did not. Polizei Major Georg Keppler refused. In fact within a year this multi-wounded veteran of the Great War went back into the army to get away from ‘politics’.

  Armed with their new legal powers Heydrich and Himmler launched mass arrests throughout Bavaria of Communists, trade union bosses, Catholic politicians and others who had opposed Hitler. Usually the arrests were made by Allgemeine SS Bereitschaften, but sometimes by ordinary policemen.

  The total number of arrests in Bavaria was so high that within days prison space became a problem. So on 22 March Heydrich sent an SD detachment to turn a disused munitions factory at Dachau near Munich into a concentration camp to house political prisoners. As kommandant of the camp Himmler chose Obersturmfuehrer Hilmar Waeckerle, and he drew his guards from the 1st Standarte of the Allgemeine SS, the Bavarian State Police and the Bavarian prison service.

  Once inside Dachau the prisoners were subjected to harsh military style treatment and beatings. Stealing a cigarette could bring 25 lashes. Other punishments included suspension from a pole by the wrists, incarceration in a standing only cell or dark cell, and in some cases death by shooting or hanging. Political prisoners who survived the eleven-hour workday and meager amounts of food were beaten into submission until they were frightened and demoralized, and only then were they released. Even under normal German law it was legal to beat prisoners, but this camp was much harsher than normal.

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  Hitler and his propaganda machine headed by Josef Goebbels began to use the state media to promulgate their Nazi ideology, their purpose being to literally fuse the nation and the Nazi party into one. To modernize the nation, Hitler insisted that the old Gothic script should be left behind and the Latin script should be the norm from now on. As part of this rationalization he insisted that German was the one and only language of the nation, and that citizens who spoke the other indigenous languages of Germany [Wend, Lithuanian, Frisian, Danish and Polish] from now on would be legally required to use German. Naturally immigrant groups were also forced to speak German, although again there was an exception - with the Nazis there was always an exception - Russian members of the Whiteshirts were allowed to openly use the Russian language!

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  Himmler’s concentration camp at Dachau was not working out. Not all policemen, prison guards and SS men were as brutal as he, and some of them testified in court against Waeckerle, their kommandant, until he was charged with murder. Feeling humiliated by the court judges, Himmler was forced to dismiss Waeckerle from the SS and publicly disavow him! Himmler received no support from Hitler in this dispute.

  So Himmler needed a new kommandant for the camp, and he wanted one who would stand up to the courts and at the same time instill some discipline into the guards, who were confused as to where they stood. The non-SS guards were especially ignorant of what was required of them. Therefore, in June 1933 Himmler approached Theodore Eicke, who was a strict disciplinarian. Would Eicke control the guards and put some Nazi spirit into them, he asked? Eicke answered positively. It was just what the doctor ordered, thought Eicke. He was currently undergoing treatment for a mental illness. It is possible that Eicke had been incarcerated for political reasons rather than an illness. His psychiatrist was Werner Heyde.

  Eicke had been a rear-echelon soldier in the Great War, following which his hometown in Lorraine had been annexed by France. Refusing to live under French occupation and especially refusing to be a reservist in the French Army he wandered Germany, failed as a policeman four times owing to political radicalism, and had then become a security consultant for I. G. Farben. He had also become a reservist in the SA and had later transferred to the SS.

  Once he arrived at Dachau Eicke immediately sent the Bavarian policemen and prison guards back to their original jobs [no doubt to their relief], and he informed the remaining SS guards that he wanted only those SS men who wished to make the camp their career! To this end with Himmler’s permission he established a new branch of the SS, the SS KZL - Konzentrationslagerdienst [Concentration Camp Service], and he preached to this select few the concept of the ‘enemy behind the wire’. Namely, that just because a man was a prisoner did not mean he was no longer one’s enemy. Indeed the act of imprisonment had made him a more determined enemy. Eicke divided his guards into inner perimeter and outer perimeter. Outer perimeter guards patrolled with dogs and rifles or sat in wooden towers with machine guns and searchlights and rarely came into contact with the prisoners. Inner perimeter guards on the other hand had actual verbal and physical contact with the inmates.

  As time went on the Dachau prisoner list included not just political detainees, but
sexual perverts, rapists, the homeless, male homosexuals, beggars, alcoholics, anti-socials like the work-shy and habitual criminals such as gangsters and professional thieves. The outer perimeter guards shot down anyone trying to escape. Perhaps in the early days these guards consoled themselves with the thought that the escapee might be a rapist or a murderer.

  In addition to their normal duties, the outer perimeter guards were trained by Eicke as soldiers for combat assignments! Eicke too had a secret agenda.

  The inner perimeter guards were chosen by Eicke for their brutality and/or sociopathic attitude. As time passed they became ever more cruel, though in the early months the actual murder of inmates was rare. In fact the guards became more institutionalized than most inmates, because the guards made this their career, whereas most prisoners were only sentenced to terms of a few months. Upon release they were told that if they talked about what they had witnessed, they would soon be brought back for ‘reeducation’.

  However, Eicke went one step further, by actually involving the prisoners themselves in the day-to-day running of the camp. Under his system a camp senior was chosen among the prisoners. He in turn picked block seniors, and each of them picked room seniors. When the prisoners were on a work detail, they were controlled by trustee prisoners known as Kapos. Clerical staff was also drawn from the inmates. Disobedience of an order given by any one of these trustee prisoners was treated like disobedience of the camp kommandant himself. The vast majority of such trustees were Jews, though how much this was due to the Jews themselves and how much to a deliberate hiring policy on the part of Eicke requires further study. Either way the inmates became even more anti-Semitic owing to this arrangement.