Heydrich took his dismissal very badly. He wept, the only time he ever did so in Lina’s presence. He could think of no future for himself outside the services. But Lina von Osten had other ideas. She was a passionate Nazi, whose conversion had started when at the age of sixteen she had first heard Hitler speak at a meeting in Kiel. She knew all about the S.S., and believed that in this movement there should be a place for so talented and handsome an officer as her unemployed lover. He responded to her enthusiasm and joined the Party, and it was her resolution that eventually persuaded him to make the contact with Eberstein that led to his visit to Himmler in June.5
Himmler, though in many respects a weak man, was nevertheless astute and calculating. Throughout his career as head of the S.S. he surrounded himself with men who in one way or another compensated for whatever was lacking in his own nature, while at the same time ensuring that they remained his servants. He used their strength, their brutality, or their intelligence to fulfil his purpose for him in whatever portion of his total plan it suited him to place them. Since, unlike Goring or Goebbels, he preferred to hover in the background out of the public eye, except on those formal occasions when it was necessary for him to be seen alongside the other leaders, he was not averse to letting his subordinates act as his agents while he kept out of sight, the spider silently operating at the centre of his web. But in Heydrich Himmler met a man who became his match. Heydrich was quick to realize the intentions of the Reichsführer S.S. and to exploit them for his own purposes, while carefully posing in his presence and that of others as a dutiful subordinate. Yet a kind of dubious, mutual respect existed between the two men which amounted in Himmler’s case to a form of affection; they shared the same negative ideals, though in nature and temperament they could not have been more diverse. For the next ten years, however, they were to be bound together, each man the other’s evil genius, until Heydrich’s assassination in 1942 suddenly removed him at a time when, in the estimation of many who knew him well, he was preparing to supersede Himmler and even outbid Hitler for power during this final period, for the Führer’s leadership was undermined by his own obsessions and threatened by the intrigues of his subordinates.
In June 1931, at the age of twenty-seven, Heydrich gladly accepted this minor post in the S.S. in which an increasing number of men of officer rank and even of aristocratic background were enlisting. He took up his duties in Munich officially on 10 August, and by Christmas had been promoted to the rank of a major in the S.S. At the same time, on 26 December, he married his resolute fiancée Lina von Osten, who was then only twenty years old. Major Heydrich’s salary was RM 180 a month, or about £15,6 and from the start he began the patient and methodical compilation of secret information on the private lives of men and women inside and, when it was likely to prove useful, outside the Party as well. By the end of the year he had assembled a small staff of helpers, and in 1932 (during a period of which, April to July, the S.A. and S.S. organizations were, officially at least, disbanded by the German government), Himmler used Heydrich’s skill and experience to help him reorganize the whole movement. In the summer Heydrich was promoted a colonel and given the title of Chief of the Sicherheitsdienst, but by then his influence was spread throughout the service, and he founded for Himmler an S.S. Junkerschule,7 an elite leadership school at Bad-Toelz in Upper Bavaria.
By now the S.S. was a substantial force. Although the original 280 men whom Himmler found under him in January 1929 had increased by January 1931 to only 400 enlisted members, supplemented by some 1,500 part-time recruits, there were by the time the Brüning government disbanded the S.A. and the S.S. in April 1932 as many as 30,000 S.S. men. The organization, however, still remained nominally a part of the S.A.
With the rapid growth of the S.S., a more comprehensive form of para-military organization had to be devised. In this Himmler sought the advice of Heydrich who, in addition to his organization of the S.D., became in effect Himmler’s Chief of Staff in the development of the S.S. as a whole, which was spread in units throughout Germany. Officers in certain centres such as Berlin, where Daluege controlled the S.S., acted with complete independence, and paid little or no attention to headquarters in Munich. The S.S. was now subjected to specialist departments for administration, training and discipline; among them was Heydrich’s unit which, while claiming to be the intelligence section, was in fact a highly organized spy-ring with an increasing network of carefully graded agents and informers. A filing system was devised so that every useful detail about the public and private lives of every individual working for or against the Party, whether he was inside or outside it, was recorded, more especially if the information was of such a nature that it could at any time in the future be extracted and used as a weapon against him. The ultimate strength of Himmler and Heydrich came very much to depend on the fear the existence of these files generated once it became known that they were the closely-guarded possession of the S.D. Heydrich modelled his department on what he regarded as the British spy system, which he held to be the most efficient in the world.
The year 1932 was a period of difficulty and dissension for the Party. Hitler’s instinctive sense of caution and self-protection led him to counterbalance the growing powers of his subordinates by creating for them overlapping functions, so that they expended their excess energies in the exercise of mutual distrust, and were to a considerable extent neutralized through their own intrigue. He encouraged the development of the S.S. not only because it provided the movement with a superior, class-conscious force that encouraged former officers and men of the upper class to join its ranks, but also because the rapid increase of its numbers helped to counterbalance the unruly private army of the S.A. This numbered by 1930 some 100,000 men, drawn mostly from the unemployed, and it was giving Hitler considerable trouble at the very time when he needed the support of the right-wing politicians and industrialists.
The ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of the Party were in a state of open dissension, and in September 1930, the month of the elections in which the Party hoped to win many more seats in the Reichstag, the S.A. went so far as to storm the Party offices in Berlin so as to give an open demonstration of their anger when Otto Strasser, the man they regarded as their champion, was dismissed from the Party. He and Stennes were embarrassing Hitler’s attempts to win support from the Right. Only firm action by Hitler had stopped a catastrophe: to placate these unruly men he made himself Commander of the S.A. Exploiting the crisis of the unemployed, the Nazis won a substantial victory at the polls which entitled them to 107 seats in the Reichstag. It was then, in January 1931, that Hitler called on his old supporter Roehm, who had been working as a military instructor in Bolivia, to return to Germany and become Chief of Staff of the S.A. This appointment introduced a new, intrusive figure into the private world of Himmler and Heydrich. Roehm, a professional soldier, able and ambitious, imposed a new discipline on the S.A., of which the S.S. remained a part, while at the same time he entered into the round of political intrigue of which Goring was the principal agent and Goebbels the propagandist. The fact that Roehm was a notorious homosexual was to prove invaluable for Heydrich’s files, but in the meantime it became obvious that Himmler’s position in the Party and his relationship to Hitler and the other leaders must be more clearly worked out.8
Himmler never became a member of Hitler’s more intimate social circle, certainly never in the sense that Goebbels or Goring rivalled each other in entertaining the leader, taking meals with him or accompanying him as confidential adviser on his missions. Hitler never stayed at Himmler’s house in Gmund, though he made occasional brief visits. Himmler, hiding his ambitions under a kind of obsequious devotion to service, accepted a lower level of influence during this crucial period in Hitler’s formidable onslaught on the succession of weak and crumbling governments in the Reichstag. It is true that he had become a Party deputy in the Reichstag in 1930,9 but unlike Goring or Goebbels, he took no prominent part in the acrimonious and violent exch
anges which Goring largely engineered in order to bring discredit to the Reichstag as a machine of government. His part in the Reichstag was that of the supporter of policies determined by others, and a revealing glimpse of him has been recorded on the day when Goring, as President of the Reichstag, outmanoeuvred von Papen’s government and secured the dissolution of the Chamber. It was Himmler, resplendent in his black uniform, his pince-nez secure, who hurried from the Reichstag during the recess to fetch Hitler to a conference at Göring’s presidential palace. He beamed, he clicked his heels, he Heil-Hitlered, and he urged the Führer to hurry as they had Papen at a disadvantage.10
A tenuous, but none the less important, link between Himmler and the Führer at this time lay in the financier Wilhelm Keppler, described by Papen at the Nuremberg Trial as ‘a man who was always in Hitler’s entourage’. By 1932 Keppler had become one of Hitler’s closest economic advisers; he had been introduced to Hitler by Himmler, and his gratitude expressed itself later in his financial patronage of Himmler’s racial researches.11 Keppler became one of the principal men responsible for maintaining relations between the Party and a widening circle of industrialists, and it was through him that the notorious meeting between Hitler and Papen took place at the house of the banker Kurt von Schroeder in Cologne, on 4 January 1933, when certain plans to bring down Schleicher’s government were discussed which were to result in Hitler becoming Chancellor at the end of the month. Himmler was a shadowy supporter on the occasion of this meeting, and later assisted in promoting the next stage of the negotiations through a newcomer to the political stage, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at whose villa in Dahlem the uneasy conferences were continued between Hitler and Papen with Keppler and Himmler still present.
Roehm, meanwhile, was taking an arbitrary line with the S.S. in Berlin, which under Daluege still managed to remain independent of Himmler in Munich. Roehm appointed his own director of training for the S.S. in his area, Friedrich Krueger, but on public occasions Roehm and Himmler appeared together in apparent harmony. Himmler was in no position to press openly for power; he was forced to play the part of the subordinate, while at the same time he studied the opportunities which the work of Heydrich and his S.D. agents were so diligently compiling. He was well satisfied with the rapid growth of the S.S. directly under his control, and with the carefully planned organization and training which had been achieved.
Himmler’s father, Gebhard Himmler
Himmler as a schoolboy in Munich (second row from the front, second from the right)
A description of the S.S. formations during the period 1933-4 was given before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg by von Eberstein, the man who had introduced Heydrich to Himmler; Eberstein was an ex-officer and civil servant who had joined the S.S. in 1928 and was typical of its aristocratic leanings. ‘Before 1933’, he said at Nuremberg, ‘a great number of aristocrats and members of German princely houses joined the S.S.’12 He mentioned, for example, the Prince von Waldeck, and the Prince von Mecklenburg, and after 1932, the Prince Lippe-Biesterfeld, General Graf von Schulenburg, Archbishop Groeber of Freiburg, the Archbishop of Brunswick and the Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. When Himmler took over in 1929, there had been, according to Eberstein, only about fifty S.S. men in the district of Thuringia, where he was acting for the S.S. in Weimar, but after the seizure of power he had charge of some 15,000 S.S. men in the area covering Saxony and Thuringia. The elegant S.S. uniform attracted recruits and added to their social prestige. As Eberstein said at Nuremberg:
‘The increase can be explained first by the fact that the National Socialist government had come to power, and a large number of people wanted to show their loyalty to the new State. Secondly, after the Party in May 1933 ordered that no more members should be taken, many wanted to become members of the semi-military formations such as the S.S. and S.A., and through them to become members of the Party later. But then again there were also others who sought the pleasures of sport and the comradeship of young men and were less politically interested… From about February or March 1934, Himmler ordered an investigation of all those S.S. members who had joined in 1933, a thorough reinvestigation which lasted until 1935, and at that time about fifty to sixty thousand members throughout the entire Reich were released from the S.S…. The selection standards required a certificate of good conduct from the police. It was required that people be able to prove that they led a decent life and performed their duty in their profession. No unemployed persons or people who were unwilling to work were accepted.’
For Heydrich, the S.S. already represented the nucleus of a secret police once the Party came to power. As Reitlinger has pointed out, an official political police already existed in both Berlin and Munich, and when the great police purge came after 30 January many men in this secret service remained to serve the Nazis; among them for example was Heinrich Mueller, who later became head of the Gestapo before he had in fact become a Party member. Affidavits read at the Nuremberg Trial make it clear that the S.D. was well prepared with its screenings of the members of the Political Police in Munich, which was known as Department VI of the Police Organization. Most of them were immediately absorbed into the service of Himmler when he was appointed President of Police in Munich by Hitler, a very minor office compared with that given to Goring who, in addition to his Cabinet rank and Presidency of the Reichstag, became also Minister of the Interior for the state of Prussia. This appointment gave Goring charge of the police in what was by far the largest and most influential state administration in Germany. Goring immediately used his authority to place the Berlin S.S. leader, Kurt Daluege, at the head of the Prussian police, and appointed Rudolf Diels, a police official married to his cousin, Ilse Goring, as head of the section of political police that he created, the Berlin Police Bureau 1A, which was later to be renamed the Gestapo. Daluege at this stage was wholly under the influence of Goring and refused even to receive Heydrich, who went to Berlin to see him on Himmler’s behalf on 15 March. Daluege, young, bland and opportunist without either intelligence or conscience, had reached the rank of an S.S. general by the age of twenty-nine. Before joining the S.S., he had been in charge of refuse disposal for the City Engineer. Now he had to use his wits to steer his way through the conflicting currents of his superiors’ struggle for power.13
In the months immediately following Hitler’s Chancellorship, it was Goring, not Himmler, who was the principal activator of police control. He poured his prodigious energy into the defeat of the remnants of democracy in Germany and into the rout of the Communists, the Party’s chosen enemy in the Reichstag and in the streets. Speed was what mattered, and the use of violence and terror to break up the forces of resistance before they could realize what was happening and oppose this sudden, savage onslaught by rallying themselves to out-vote Hitler in the elections due on 5 March. Within a week the Prussian Parliament was dissolved; within a month unreliable police chiefs and civil servants alike were dismissed and replaced, and the police, both new and old, were armed; ‘a bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet’, cried Goring. To stop disorders, either real or imagined, Goring commandeered 25,000 men from the S.A. and 10,000 from the S.S. and armed them to supplement the activities of the police; the Communist leaders were arrested and their party virtually put out of action before the elections could be fought. In February, the night of the Reichstag fire, both Hitler and Goring declared that a Communist putsch had been imminent and that the fire was a beacon from heaven with which to blaze the trail of the Communist traitors. On 28 February the clauses of the constitution guaranteeing civil liberties were suspended, and anyone could be placed without trial under ‘protective custody’. At the polls the Nazis secured only a bare majority along with their allies the Nationalists, but with the Reichstag stripped of its Communist deputies Hitler was able to put through an Enabling Bill on 23 March which gave him power to govern by means of emergency decrees.
Action of this order was scarcely in Himmler’s
nature. When it was decided that the Catholic Conservative government in Munich should be removed, it was the S.A. under the Ritter von Epp, the friend of Roehm, who dismissed them on 8 March. Himmler, the Bavarian President of Police, was by-passed. In the same month, Goring set up his first concentration camps in Prussia under the supervision of Diels, and in April segregated his political police in their own headquarters in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. In January they became known officially as the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Secret State Police, or Gestapo for short. This was a first significant move towards centralization in the police control of the state, and it was a warning to Himmler, whose autonomy still lay only in Bavaria.
Between April 1933 and April of the following year, Himmler took his own devious but independent line of action. Heydrich had become head of the Bavarian secret police and of the S.S. Security Office. Himmler established his own model concentration camp at Dachau, parallel with those created by Goring and others which were set up elsewhere, both semi-officially and unofficially by the S.S., the S.A. and the Nazi Gauleiters, who had been hurried into office in the various Gaue, or regions, into which Germany was divided for Nazi administration. At Nuremberg Goring claimed that he closed those unauthorized camps that came to his notice and where, he gathered, brutalities were practised. A camp founded by the S.S. near Osnabrück led to active friction between Himmler and Goring, whose investigators, led by Diels, claimed they were fired upon by the S.S. guards when they were sent to find out what was happening. Himmler was forced to close the camp on direct orders from Hitler. Göring’s intervention was largely dictated by his desire at this time to become the co-ordinator of police activities throughout Germany. That he failed was due to the persistent ambition of Himmler to improve his personal position and the desire of Roehm to merge the large forces of the S.A. into those of the regular army with himself as Supreme Commander, a situation which neither Goring nor Hitler would tolerate.
Heinrich Himmler Page 5
