The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  III

  Nazi terror was nowhere more apparent than in the emerging power and fearsome reputation of the Gestapo. The role of the police in hunting down and apprehending political and other types of offenders had become more central to the repressive apparatus of the regime once the first wave of mass violence by the brownshirts had ebbed away. The Gestapo in particular quickly attained an almost mythical status as an all-seeing, all-knowing arm of state security and law enforcement. People soon began to suspect that it had agents in every pub and club, spies in every workplace or factory, informers lurking in every bus and tram and standing on every street corner.186 The reality was very different. The Gestapo was a very small organization with a tiny number of paid agents and informers. In the shipbuilding city of Stettin, there were only 41 Gestapo officers in 1934, the same number as in Frankfurt am Main; in 1935 there were only 44 Gestapo officers in Bremen, and 42 in Hanover. The district office for the Lower Rhine, covering a population of 4 million people, had only 281 agents in its headquarters in Düsseldorf and its various sub-branches in the region, in March 1937. Far from being the fanatical Nazis of legend, these men were generally career policemen who had joined the force under the Weimar Republic or in some cases even earlier. Many of them thought of themselves in the first place as trained professionals. In Würzburg, for example, only the head of the Gestapo office and his successor had joined the Nazi Party before the end of January 1933; the others had kept their distance from political involvement. All told, of the 20,000 or so men who were serving Gestapo officers across the whole of Germany in 1939, only 3,000 were also members of the SS, despite the fact that their organization had been run by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, from early on in the Third Reich.187

  The professional policemen who staffed the Gestapo included its head, Heinrich Müller, of whom a local Nazi Party official wrote in 1937 that ‘we can hardly imagine him as a member of the Party’. An internal Party memorandum from the same year, indeed, could not understand how ‘so odious an opponent of the movement’ could become head of the Gestapo, especially since he had once referred to Hitler as ‘an immigrant unemployed house-painter’ and ‘an Austrian draft-dodger’. Other Nazi Party officials noted, however, that Muller was ‘incredibly ambitious’ and would be ‘bent on recognition from his superiors under any system’. The key to his durability under the Nazi regime was his fanatical anti-Communism, imbibed when he had been assigned his first case as a policeman at the age of nineteen - the murder of the hostages by the ‘Red Army’ in revolutionary Munich after the end of the First World War. He had run the anti-Communist department of the Munich political police during the Weimar Republic and put the crushing of Communism above everything else, including what the Nazi regime liked to refer to as ‘legal niceties’. Moreover, Muller, who had volunteered for war service at the age of seventeen and subsequently been decorated several times for bravery, was a stickler for duty and discipline, and approached the tasks he was set as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who never took a holiday and was hardly ever ill, Muller was determined to serve the German state, irrespective of what political form it took, and believed that it was everyone’s duty, not least his own, to obey its dictates without question. Impressed with his exemplary efficiency and dedication, Heydrich kept him on and indeed enrolled him in the Security Service with his entire team.188

  Most of the leading Gestapo officials were office workers rather than field operatives. They spent much of their time in compiling and updating elaborate card indices, processing floods of incoming instructions and regulations, filing masses of papers and documents and disputing competence with other agencies and institutions. Building on the already very detailed indices of Communists and their sympathizers drawn up by the political police under the Weimar Republic, the Gestapo aimed to keep a comprehensive register of ‘enemies of the state’, broken down into a host of different categories who were to be subject to different kinds of treatment. Tabs on the index cards showed the category to which each individual belonged - dark red for a Communist, light red for a Social Democrat, violet for a ‘grumbler’ and so on. Bureaucratized policing had a long tradition in Germany. It was largely information-gathering and processing systems such as these, and the clerks needed to maintain them, that accounted for the increase in the Berlin Gestapo headquarters budget from one million Reichsmarks in 1933 to no less than forty million in 1937.189

  Fewer than 10 per cent of the cases with which the Gestapo dealt came from investigations it had begun itself. Some derived from paid informers and spies, most of them casually employed amateurs. Other agencies in which people’s identity could be checked, such as population registration offices and the local criminal police, the railways and the Post Office, contributed their part as well. Sometimes, the Gestapo asked known Nazi Party activists to help them track down oppositional elements. No particular disadvantage seems to have resulted to most of these people if they refused. The League of German Girls activist Melita Maschmann was contacted by the Gestapo and asked to spy on the family of a former friend whose brothers were active in a Communist youth resistance group. When she refused, she wrote later, ‘I was harassed daily and finally my National Socialist convictions were called into question.’ Beyond this, however, nothing happened to her. In any case, she eventually came round. A senior member of the League of German Girls convinced her that the resistance group was ‘endangering the future of Germany’. So she complied, only to find that she was unable to convince her friend’s family of her bona fides, so the house was empty when she arrived there on the day on which the resistance group was scheduled to meet. ‘The Gestapo official’, she remembered, ‘was waiting for me outside the house and dismissed me with a curse.’ It was only because she was valued as a propagandist, she thought, that she was kept on in the League of German Girls after this.190

  Most frequently, information on labour movement resistance activities came from Communists or Social Democrats whose will had been broken by torture and who had agreed in consequence to inform on their former comrades. Gestapo agents may have spent most of their time in the office, but their duties there included brutal interrogations, with the dirty work being done by SS thugs employed for the purpose. A graphic portrayal of Gestapo questioning was provided by the Communist sailor Richard Krebs, who remained in Germany after the Reichstag fire as a secret courier for the Comintern. Krebs was arrested in Hamburg in 1933 and subjected to weeks of merciless beatings and whippings, completely cut off from the outside world, allowed neither a lawyer nor any kind of communication with his family or his friends. In between interrogations, he was kept chained to a cot in a tiny cell, not allowed to wash, his thumb, broken in one of the sessions with the Gestapo, untreated save for having a bandage wrapped around it. A Gestapo officer fired detailed questions at him, clearly based on information received, and on a bulky police file on him that had been compiled from the early 1920s onwards. Kept in the local prison at Fühlsbüttel for most of the time, Krebs continued to be driven at intervals to Hamburg’s Gestapo headquarters to be questioned by police officers who looked on while SS men beat him up. After several weeks of this, Krebs’s back was a bloody mess, his kidneys were seriously damaged through carefully targeted beating, and he had lost the hearing in one ear. Despite such treatment, he refused to reveal any details of the organization for which he worked.191

  Transported to the central office of the Gestapo in Berlin, Krebs was impressed by the more refined and less brutal methods employed there. These depended more on tiring prisoners out by prolonged standing or kneeling in awkward positions than on direct brutality and physical abuse. But the atmosphere was the same as in Hamburg:

  Grimy corridors, offices furnished with Spartan simplicity, threats, kicks, troopers chasing chained men up and down the reaches of the building, shouting, rows of girls and women standing with their noses and toes against the walls, overflowing ash-trays, portraits of Hitler and his aides, the smell of coff
ee, smartly dressed girls working at high speed behind typewriters - girls seemingly indifferent to all the squalor and agony about them, stacks of confiscated publications, printing machines, books, and pictures, and Gestapo agents asleep on tables.192

  Before long, the Gestapo’s tactics with the recalcitrant Communist sailor reverted to their old brutality again. Krebs later claimed that he was again subjected to hours of continuous beating with rubber truncheons, and confronted by a series of former comrades whose will had been broken by the same means. A more serious impact was made on his morale, however, when the Gestapo revealed to him that they had arrested his wife when she returned to Germany from exile to look for their son, who had been taken from them and had disappeared into the welfare network. Desperate to stop the Gestapo from doing anything worse to his wife, he approached his fellow Communists in the prison and suggested he offer to work for the Gestapo, while in fact functioning for the Communist Party as a double-agent. Successfully concealing from them the fact that his wife had left the party shortly after his own arrest, he presented his stratagem as a means of rescuing a dedicated comrade from the clutches of the regime. They agreed, and the ruse worked. In March 1934 he gave in to the Gestapo, who, initially at least, accepted his feigned conversion as genuine.193 Now the tables were turned. Krebs was quickly released under an amnesty and resumed contact with the Comintern. Much of the information he gave the Gestapo seems to have been either false, or - as far as he was aware - already known to them from other sources. Their suspicions aroused, the Gestapo refused to allow his wife’s release, and she died in custody in November 1938. Convincing the Gestapo that he would be more use in the international arena, Krebs obtained permission to leave for the USA. He did not return.194 His history illustrated the close co-operation that quickly grew up between the Gestapo, the SS, the courts and the camps. It also showed the unremitting zeal with which the Nazi regime pumped Communist agents for information about the resistance, and the ruthlessness with which they pursued the goal of turning them to work for the Third Reich instead of the Communist International.195

  IV

  Information supplied by Communists and Social Democrats under torture in the prison cells of the Gestapo was mainly important in tracking down organized political opposition. Where casual remarks, political jokes and individual offences against various Nazi laws were concerned, denunciations sent in by Nazi Party agents of one kind and another, and also by members of the general public, were more important. In Saarbrücken, for instance, no fewer than 87.5 per cent of cases of ‘malicious slander against the regime’ handled by the district Gestapo office originated in reports sent in by innkeepers or people sitting in their bars, by work colleagues of the accused, by people who had overheard suspicious remarks in the street, or by members of the accused person’s family.196 So many denunciations were sent in to the Gestapo that even fanatical leading Nazis such as Reinhard Heydrich complained about them and the district Gestapo office in Saarbrücken itself registered its alarm at the ‘constant expansion of an appalling system of denunciation’. What dismayed them was in particular the fact that many denunciations appeared to be made from personal rather than ideological motives. Leading figures in the Party might have encouraged people to expose disloyalty, grumbling and dissent, but they wanted this practice to be a sign of loyalty to the regime, not a means of offloading personal resentments and gratifying personal desires. Thirty-seven per cent of 213 cases subsequently studied by one historian arose out of private conflicts, while another 39 per cent had no discernible motive at all; only 24 per cent were clearly made by people acting primarily out of political loyalty to the regime. Neighbours denounced noisy or unruly people living in the same building, office workers denounced people who were blocking their promotion, small businessmen denounced inconvenient competitors, friends or colleagues who quarrelled sometimes took the final step of sending in a denunciation to the Gestapo. School or university students even on occasion denounced their teachers. Whatever the motive, the Gestapo investigated them all. If the denunciation was without foundation, they usually simply relegated it to the files and took no further action. But in many cases, denunciation could lead to the arrest of the person denounced, torture, imprisonment and even death.197

  In prosecuting ‘malicious gossip’, the police, the Gestapo and the courts tended to be fairly lenient where middle-class offenders were concerned, and much tougher if the offender was a worker, though the largest group of offenders came from the lower middle class, reflecting not least the fact that denunciation seems to have been most common in this social group. Basing themselves on this law, the Special Courts cracked down hard on the kind of casual dissent that would go unremarked in a normal democratic political system, sentencing over 3,700 people in 1933, and sending the majority of them to prison for an average of six months each. Two-thirds of the defendants tried under this law in the Frankfurt Special Court had been denounced in pubs and bars by fellow drinkers for their remarks. Most offenders were working-class men, who, probably because the courts suspected them of being closet Communists or Social Democrats, received much harsher treatments than Nazi Party members or members of the middle and upper classes.198 A study of several thousand malicious gossip cases brought before the Munich Special Court has shown, however, that the proportion of cases where the accused acted from party-political motives fell from 50 per cent in 1933 to an average of only 12 per cent in 1936-9. From breaking the will of Communists and Social Democrats to resist in 1933-4, the Court had moved to the new function of preventing any kind of open criticism of the regime, and indeed there was a mild increase in the proportion of ex-Nazis and conservatives and a substantial increase in the proportion of Catholics amongst the accused in the late 1930s.199

  Among the statements that landed offenders in gaol under the Malicious Gossip Law were allegations that the Nazis were suppressing the people’s freedom, that civil servants were overpaid, that Julius Streicher’s sensationalistic antisemitic paper The Stormer brought shame on culture, that prisoners were being beaten up in Dachau, that Hitler was an Austrian deserter, that the brownshirts were all ex-Communists (this was a favourite accusation of conservative Catholics), and that Hermann Göring and other leading figures in the Third Reich were corrupt. The offenders were hardly radical, principled or sophisticated critics of the regime, then, and their offending statements were often little more than inarticulate and uninformed expressions of discontent, put into a personal form.200 Some officials felt uneasy at the fact that, as a regional administrator put it in 1937, ‘the sentencing of chatterboxes makes up a very large proportion of the activities of the Special Courts’. Most of those arrested and tried under the Malicious Gossip Law, he thought, were just grumblers who did not oppose the regime in any serious way at all. ‘Necessary though it is to crack down hard on treasonable verbal propaganda,’ he went on, ‘there is also a considerable danger that the excessively harsh punishment of basically harmless chatter will lead to bitterness and incomprehension among the friends and relatives of those who are condemned for it by the courts.’ But this was to miss the point. Jokes and rude remarks about the Nazi leaders never amounted to opposition or resistance on principle; it was in most cases little more than blowing off steam. But the regime was not just concerned to suppress active opposition; it sought to eliminate even the tiniest signs of discontent, and to suppress anything that might suggest that the population was not massively and wholeheartedly behind everything it did. From this point of view, malicious gossip and political jokes could be just as objectionable as outright criticism and resistance.201

  Offenders often landed before the courts as the result of mere chance. An actor, for example, sat down at a table in a restaurant near the railway station in Munich one spring day in 1938; the table was already occupied by a married couple, whom he had not met before, and they fell into conversation. As he began to criticize the regime’s foreign policy, he noticed from their reaction that he had gone too far;
he hurriedly rose from the table to catch his train, or so he claimed. The couple followed him, but could not find him, so they gave his description to the police, who tracked him down and arrested him two days later. Others landed before the court as a result of personal quarrels that got out of hand, as when a drunken postal worker began insulting Hitler in the presence of two minor Party functionaries whom he knew. When they tried to shut him up, he made matters worse by insulting one of the two men in his capacity as a Party official, so that the latter felt he could only restore his authority amongst the pub regulars by denouncing the postal worker to the police. Whatever the way in which a denunciation occurred, it was obviously dangerous to speak freely in public; people could never be sure who was listening. It was the unpredictability of denunciation, rather than its frequency, that mattered. It caused people to believe that agents of the Gestapo, paid or unpaid, were everywhere, and that the police knew everything that was going on. 202

  Denunciations from ordinary people were important. By far the largest proportion of them came in from men; the places in which denouncers overheard suspicious statements, like pubs and bars, were frequently socially barred to women, and even when it was a woman who overheard a statement, perhaps in the stairway of a block of flats or in some similar domestic environment, she often left it to her husband or father to bring the matter to the attention of the police. The proportion varied from place to place, but on average about four out of five denouncers were male. The same domination of men obtained among the denounced. Politics in the Third Reich, even at this very basic level, was predominantly a man’s business.203 Denunciations, however, were only one of many different means of repression and control available to the Gestapo, and, of course, the proportion of ordinary people who actually sent in denunciations was extremely small when set against the population as a whole. A study of the Düsseldorf Gestapo office has shown that out of 825 Gestapo investigations in the historian’s random sample from the period 1933 to 1944, 26 per cent began with information sent in from members of the general population, 17 per cent from the criminal police and other agencies of law enforcement and control such as the SS, 15 per cent from the Gestapo’s own officers or informers, 13 per cent from persons under interrogation in the Gestapo’s cells, 7 per cent from local authorities and other agencies of the state, and 6 per cent from Nazi Party organizations of one kind and another.204 Some of these too may have been initiated in the first place by members of the population, for example sending in a denunciation to a Party agency or local government office. But Party agencies were undoubtedly very important in the whole process of bringing dissent before the Special Courts. In the Bavarian town of Augsburg, it was noted that areas with a strong tradition of labour movement solidarity and the presence of organized opposition to the regime produced fewer denunciations than districts with a high degree of support for the Nazis. Forty-two per cent of denouncers belonged to the Nazi Party or one of its organizations, and 30 per cent of these had joined before 1933.205