by Mark Felton
The Führer’s Irish sister-in-law, Bridget Hitler, first told this story. She said it happened in 1935, just two years into Hitler’s leadership of Germany and a year after he had ordered the SA senior officers to be liquidated during The Night of the Long Knives. Some believe that Kraus came the closest of all Hitler’s would-be assassins to actually killing him. If the story is true, Kraus joins a very long list of men who for a multitude of reasons decided that Hitler, now Chancellor of Germany, must die. Many came almost as close as Kraus. It was up to Hitler’s constantly evolving security apparatus to prevent any of them from succeeding. Guarding the world’s most hated man was one of the busiest personal protection details in history.
On Hitler’s assumption of the leadership of Germany in January 1933, his new home was the Old Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which was both the seat of government and his official residence for entertaining and impressing foreign heads of state and other dignitaries.
The Old Reich Chancellery was originally the Rococo-style city palace of the enormously wealthy Prince Antoni Radziwill, who died in 1833. The palace, which dominated the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin’s government quarter, was acquired by the newly unified German state in 1871 and its first inhabitant was the ‘Iron Chancellor’, Otto von Bismarck.2 It was in this building, in Reich President Paul von Hindenburg’s office, that Hitler was appointed chancellor.
The building was significantly enlarged in 1930 and once Hitler took up residence further extension was completed by 1935. Hitler’s private apartments were redesigned and a large reception hall cum ballroom added, as well as a large conservatory known at the Wintergarten. The conservatory connected with a large cellar that was reinforced and became known as the Reich Chancellery Air Raid Shelter in 1936, later renamed the Vorbunker when Hitler’s Führerbunker was constructed deep beneath it.
The Old Reich Chancellery’s main entrance was on the Wilhelm-strasse. Gaining access to the Old Reich Chancellery before 1935 was not particularly difficult as in the beginning the complex was only lightly guarded, despite assassination attempts on previous chancellors and ministers during the Weimar period. A police sentry at the main street entrance who watched strangers carefully but did not actually check identification documents guarded Hitler’s private apartments. This was done inside at the receptionist’s desk. A second guarded gate gave access to the inner courtyard and Hitler’s private apartments. The police officer at the second gate could not see the main entrance, so visitors and deliverymen were issued with metal tags to present to this guard before entering Hitler’s private world. The gap in security was obvious, and a determined assassin could probably have overcome two policemen and a male receptionist to get at Hitler. The policemen were drawn from Berlin’s 16th Police Precinct and were under the command of Hauptmann Koplien. There was a third security post located at the main vehicle entrance gate, where a policeman checked the identity documents of drivers and their passengers before permitting them entry. A single armed guard drawn from the Leibstandarte SS ‘Adolf Hitler’ (SS Lifeguard Regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’ or LSSAH) assisted him. This gate was kept locked between 9.00pm and 7.00am.
The wider Reich Chancellery complex was guarded by other Army, SS and police guards drawn from several different units and as time went on the security measures and the depth of protection for the head of state was steadily increased. The SS, in line with their increasing power in the Nazi state, also became more visible at the Reich Chancellery.
The LSSAH were the epitome of the Nazi ideal of the Aryan warrior. Tall, healthy and National Socialist, membership was exclusive and the selection process rigorous. All candidates had to prove Aryan ancestry back to 1750. The symbol of the Totenkopf (Death’s Head) was chosen because of its association with older elite formations of the Kingdom of Prussia and later German Empire.
By March 1933 the SS had grown from 280 to 50,000 men. It was decided to form a new bodyguard unit to protect Hitler, the men mostly drawn from the 1st SS-Standarte in Munich. Its new commander, a former army sergeant major named Sepp Dietrich, selected 117 men to form SS-Stabswache Berlin. Many of the 117 originals went on to spectacular careers during the war, three becoming divisional commanders and eight winning the Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest gallantry award. Two training units were also formed, SSSonderkommando Zossen and SS-Sonderkommando Jüterbog. In September 1933 the three units were amalgamated into one and at a ceremony in November outside the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, a holy place in Nazi ideology because of the bloody events of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, the unit swore a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler and received the title – Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. In April 1934 Himmler changed the unit name to Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler to clearly differentiate the troops from the SA and the Reichswehr.
The LSSAH provided several sentries at the Old Reich Chancellery, who dressed in full black SS uniforms, red Nazi Party armbands and black steel helmets that were an intentionally intimidating sight. When the Führer was in residence the LSSAH mounted a ‘long guard’ consisting of one officer, three NCOs and thirty-nine men. When Hitler was elsewhere the guard was reduced to three NCOs and thirty-three men. They were on constant patrol armed with either automatic pistols or Mauser Karabiner 98K rifles. Four static guard posts were manned outside the Adjutant’s Office, kitchen anteroom, garden front and garage entrance on Hermann-Göring-Strasse.
In 1932 Sepp Dietrich had also been ordered to create a permanent close protection group for Hitler during the crucial year the Führer spent campaigning for the Reichstag. Dietrich created the SS-Begleit Kommando Des Führers (SS Escort Command of the Leader), consisting of twelve ruthless and coldly efficient SS officers. Dressed in black uniforms and red party armbands, they accompanied Hitler everywhere. Later in the war they reverted to a standard field grey SS uniform with a special cuff band.
On 15 March 1933 Himmler, keen to place his men as close to Hitler as possible, founded a new unit that was also tasked with protecting the Führer. Called the Führer Schutz Kommando (Führer Protection Command or FSK), its commander was 35-year-old SS-Standartenführer Johann Rattenhuber. A Bavarian, Rattenhuber was a former policeman and First World War infantryman and would remain at Hitler’s side until the very end. He only joined the Nazi Party after he was appointed to lead the FSK, his police skills being more important than his ideology. His deputy, SS-Obersturmführer Peter Högl had worked as a miller in Bavaria before the Great War, joined the army in 1916 and served on the Western Front rising to the rank of corporal. In 1919 he had joined the Bavarian Police, transferring to the criminal police in 1932 before joining the SS and being appointed to the FSK. Högl was one of several men in Hitler’s inner circle who would remain with the Führer from just after the Nazi seizure of power until the bitter end in the Berlin Bunker in 1945.
From the moment Hitler moved into the Old Reich Chancellery he was a target. On 4 March 1933, shortly after Hitler had assumed the chancellorship, police in Königsberg uncovered a bomb plot against him. A local communist group led by Kurt Lutter, a ship’s carpenter, held two meetings to plan planting a bomb in the speaker’s dais when Hitler visited the city. As Hitler delivered his speech the bomb would be detonated. Unbeknown to Lutter and his co-conspirators one of their number was a police informer. The group was arrested and interrogated, but the police never found a bomb and none of the group confessed. Faced with no evidence, Lutter and his friends were released a few months later.3
Anti-Hitler organisations and groups developed throughout many levels of German society, even within the Nazi Party itself. Otto Strasser, a senior Nazi ideologue who had been ejected from the party by Hitler, led the Black Front, a Nazi organisation numbering 5,000 members by January 1933. Strasser hated Hitler, not least because his elder brother Gregor, a prominent SA leader, had been murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. He was the brains behind a plot to kill Hitler with a suitcase bomb at the party headquarters in Nuremberg in 1936. He recruited a young German Jewish student
named Helmut Hirsch who was studying in Prague to carry out the task, but Hirsch was arrested at the German frontier and later executed. Strasser himself fled to Czechoslovakia and later to Canada.
In 1935, two years into Hitler’s chancellorship, a Communist conspiracy, based in Vienna planned to assassinate Hitler. The group also planned to eliminate the Minister for War, non-Nazi Generalfeldmarschall Werner von Blomberg (ironically soon to be removed by Hitler himself following a manufactured sex scandal), Dr Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, Hermann Göring, creator of the concentration camps, and Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, but the plot eventually came to nothing.
The FSK was mainly composed of former Bavarian police officers and was initially intended to protect Hitler whilst he was within the state of Bavaria, the ‘birthplace’ of Nazism. Bavaria was Himmler’s realm. In 1934 the FSK replaced the SS-Begleitkommando des Führers, providing all of Hitler’s personal security throughout Germany. In the beginning the FSK had been forced to guard Hitler at a distance, the SS-Begleitkommando des Führers being the only agency that Hitler permitted near him. One spring day in 1933 in Munich Hitler noticed a strange car following his own and his SS-Begleitkommando bodyguards’ car. He ordered his driver, Erich Kempka, to speed up and lose the tail. Only later did he discover that the mystery car was full of FSK men.4 This incident highlighted the sometimes farcical nature of Hitler’s security in the early days.
The Nazi regime was notorious for its duplication of official positions and offices. Hitler believed in the theory of ‘divide and rule’, and he maintained his pre-eminent position of Führer by encouraging his subordinates to expend their energies fighting amongst themselves rather than contemplating replacing him. Nazi bureaucracy was highly inefficient precisely because of this duplication of roles and responsibilities, and when it came to Hitler’s personal security the story is quite confusing. No single agency was solely responsible for guarding the Führer – instead, over time several different agencies developed, causing Hitler to have simultaneous layers of security often performing overlapping or complementary functions.
An attempt was made in February 1935 to clearly understand who was guarding Hitler and whether some of these organisations should be merged or replaced. The FSK guard unit that looked after Hitler numbered eighteen men, headquartered in Berlin. Hitler was also guarded by four criminal police officers and four gendarmes from the Berlin Police, as well as thirty-one members of the LSSAH, the black uniformed, steel-helmeted sentries from Hitler’s personal lifeguard regiment. The FSK also guarded Göring, Hess, Goebbels and Himmler, while other branches dealt with administration, combatting assassination plots, protecting other Reich ministers when travelling, and also providing security for visiting foreign dignitaries. A total of seventy-six personnel performed these tasks.
On 1 August 1935 the FSK was renamed the Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSD – Reich Security Service). The early composition of the RSD reflected the multiplicity of interested organisations protecting the German head of state. A resolution in 1936 drawn up by the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), the organisation that ran the armed forces, stipulated that all RSD members had to be Wehrmacht officers, but holding extra jurisdictional powers and privileges. This unit was formally the Reichssicherheitsdienst Gruppe Geheime Feldpolizei z.b.V. (the secret special purpose security field police service), effectively a collection of army military police officers who wore SS uniform. The complex nature of the organisation meant that although they were part of the regular Wehrmacht, RSD personnel were technically also on Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s personal staff. ‘At first they wore black SS uniforms, but on the outbreak of war the whole SD changed to field grey. When serving in the Chancellery they carried 7.65mm Walther PPK automatic pistols and flashlights.’5 They wore an ‘SD’ sleeve diamond on their left cuffs. Following SS doctrine, all members had to be of pure German descent.
In 1937, in a further consolidation of Himmler’s power over the organisation, all RSD officers were fully inducted into the mainstream SS, breaking the link with the regular army and politicizing Hitler’s personal protection provided by the state.
The RSD’s orders came directly from Hitler via three of his closest subordinates: SA-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Brückner, Martin Bor-mann or Julius Schaub. Of the three, Bormann was the major block preventing Himmler from assuming complete control. Reichsführer-SS Himmler was the official head of the RSD, with Rattenhuber and Högl running the day-to-day operations. Bormann was Chief of Staff to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess until the latter’s controversial flight to Scotland in May 1941. In August 1938 the scheming Bormann had been declared a member of Hitler’s permanent entourage and he steadily expanded his influence until he controlled most of the Nazi Party organisation and was able to interfere in the operations of most government and military agencies. Two days after Hess fled Germany, Hitler created Bormann Head of the Party Chancellery, then a Reich Minister without Portfolio. He was also Hitler’s secretary. Bormann’s influence over Hitler’s protection would be most particularly felt at the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s private village in the Bavarian Alps. Bormann effectively ran the place, controlling access to Hitler, much to the frustration of other Nazi potentates.
In 1940 Bormann was probably behind an argument that led to Brückner being eased out by Julius Schaub from his post as Hitler’s chief aide. Brückner joined the Wehrmacht and finished the war as a colonel while Schaub stayed with the Führer virtually to the end, rising to become an SS-Obergruppenführer.
Personal protection for Hitler at the Old Reich Chancellery in Berlin consisted of SS-Begleitkommando, RSD, and SD-Chancellery. This last unit was not part of the main Sichersheitsdienst, the intelligence agency of the SS and Nazi Party created in 1931 and led by Reinhard Heydrich, but was a special group of experienced police who were personally responsible for the prevention of all criminal acts and dangerous behaviour inside the complex. During the daytime the SD-Chancellery consisted of nine men working in shifts of three.
The SS guards were overseen by their own officers who visited several times a day from nearby Lichtefelde Barracks to inspect their men and check that everything was satisfactory. Unfortunately, many of the SS soldiers were very young, and standing on guard being one of the most boring jobs imaginable, some acted in a manner characterised by civil servants working at the Chancellery as ‘juvenile’. For example, SS guards were reported for riding up and down in the lifts to pass the time. A complaint was also made that the SS were playing their wireless at full volume with the guardroom windows wide open.6 Perhaps the most serious accusations concerned the misuse of firearms by SS guards. On several occasions guards accidentally discharged their pistols while playing with them.
The threat of intruders was real enough and often revealed serious security lapses or gaps. On 8 June 1936 guards apprehended two women who had climbed over a wall that separated a neighbouring garden from that of the Reich Chancellery. On 11 June 1937 a more serious security breach occurred when an unemployed salesman who was desperate to see Hitler scaled a construction site fence on Vossstrasse in broad daylight without being seen. He then managed to cross the Chancellery gardens and climbed into the building through an open toilet window. He was armed with a gas pistol but his demeanour alerted an SD guard and he was arrested. An additional LSSAH sentry was placed on the construction site fence.
Just over a month later on 14 February a thirty-three-year-old butcher named Franz Kroll was apprehended inside the Reich Chancellery when he suddenly appeared outside Hitler’s private rooms and tried to push past the guards. He had a grievance with the police, and was attempting to appeal directly to his Führer.7
Even members of the SS could not be completely trusted. In 1937 Hitler addressed a rally at the Sportpalast in Berlin. A disgruntled SS soldier placed a bomb in the speaker’s platform and waited for his opportunity. Knowing that Hitler would harangue his audience for several hours, the guard took the opportunity of slipping away to use the toilet. Un
fortunately, someone locked the toilet block door while the SS man was still inside, and he was unable to activate the bomb’s timer. Hitler was saved on this occasion by the call of nature.8
Hitler was dissatisfied with the Old Reich Chancellery, calling it ‘fit for a soap company’ but not for the headquarters of Nazi Germany and asked his architect, Albert Speer, to design for him a grand new Chancellery to be constructed close by. ‘I shall have extremely important conferences in the near future, and I need huge rooms and halls with which I can impress especially the smaller potentates,’ said Hitler. ‘You can use the entire terrain along Vossstrasse, and I don’t care how much it costs.’9 In the end, Speer spent 90 million Reichs-marks on the project that was completed in 1939, employing 4,000 workers who laboured in shifts twenty-four hours a day. Speer’s marshalling of labour and his success in creating the New Reich Chancellery led Hitler to later appoint him Minister of Armaments, a position that gave him authority over slave labour.
