On September 21, after seven months of preparation, the trial opened in the Supreme Court in Leipzig. It lasted until December 23, when all the accused except van der Lubbe, the self-professed incendiary, had to be acquitted, because it was proved beyond all doubt that they could not have been there at the time. Conducted in public, before the eyes of the international press, it was a complete failure from the point of view of the Nazis. In spite of being a foreigner with an incomplete mastery of the German language, Georgi Dimitroff insisted on conducting his own defense; continuously shouting and protesting, he caused such uproar in the court that he frequently had to be excluded by the presiding judge. Goering, who appeared as an important witness for the prosecution on November 4, was driven by Dimitroff to lose his temper in front of a courtroom filled with journalists, ministers and diplomatic representatives.
Goering arrived with a uniformed entourage and himself wore the plain brown uniform adopted by the Nazi leaders now they were in power. He looked, according to Martha Dodd, daughter of Dr. William E. Dodd, the American ambassador, “pompous and yet a little nervous.” Speaking in evidence, he gave the history of his preparations for the final destruction of the Communists, and he claimed that the terrorist acts of which the Nazis were accused in the notorious Communist Brown Book were acts committed by Communists themselves wearing Nazi uniform. He had been accused of being too prepared to take action after the fire, as if he had known about it in advance. That was not so. The fire, he said, came at an inconvenient time. “I was like a commander in the field who is about to put into operation a considered plan of campaign, and by an impulsive action of the enemy is suddenly forced to change his whole tactics.” He then gave his own account of what happened on the night of the fire, adding, "I then took my measures against the Communists . . . I intended to hang van der Lubbe at once, and nobody could have stopped me. I refrained only because I thought, We have one of them, but there must have been many. Perhaps we shall need him as a witness . . . I knew as by intuition that the Communists fired the Reichstag . . . Let the trial end as it will, I will find the guilty and lead them to their punishment.”
When Dimitroff rose, anxiously leaning forward to start putting his questions to Goering, the courtroom became completely silent and concentrated. After certain preliminaries about who actually gave the orders for the arrest of the Communists and why Goering had claimed there was a Communist Party membership book in van der Lubbe’s pocket when the police had testified there was not, Dimitroff led through to his final courageous attack on Goering:
DIMITROFF: Since you, in your position, have accused the Communist Party of Germany and foreign Communists, has that not directed investigation into certain channels and prevented the search for the real incendiarist?
GOERING: For me this was a political crime and I was convinced that the criminals are to be found in your party. Your party [shaking his fist at Dimitroff] is a party of criminals and must be destroyed!
DIMITROFF: Is the Minister aware that this party rules a sixth of the earth, the Soviet Union, with which Germany maintains diplomatic, political and economic relations, from which hundreds of thousands of German workers benefit—
PRESIDING JUDGE: I forbid you to make Communist propaganda here.
DIMITROFF: Herr Goering makes National Socialist propaganda . . . Is it not known that Communism has millions of supporters in Germany . . . ?
GOERING [shouting]: It is known that you are behaving insolently, that you have come here to burn the Reichstag . . . In my opinion you are a criminal who should be sent to the gallows!
JUDGE: Dimitroff, I have told you not to make Communist propaganda. You must not be surprised if the witness gets excited.
DIMITROFF [quietly] : I am very satisfied with the Minister’s reply.
GOERING [still shouting]: Out with you, you scoundrel!
JUDGE: Take him away!
DIMITROFF [as he is being led out by the police]: Are you afraid of my questions, Herr Ministerpräsident?
Goering was now beside himself with rage. His voice rose to a scream, his face turned deep red and he choked; to one observer he even seemed to show signs of fear as he tried to drown Dimitroff’s insolent, impassioned sarcasm. He turned on the Bulgarian as the latter was being dragged from the courtroom and shouted, “You wait until we get you outside this court, you scoundrel!” Then, overcome, he leaned against the witnesses’ table.
Throughout the whole of Goering’s appearance in court, Diels stood near him, listening to every word, watching every movement. Up to the last few minutes Goering had evidently been aware of this, for he had made changes in his voice or manner while Diels circled round him like a stage director. Diels with a certain suggestion of pride had persuaded Martha Dodd, with whom he was on friendly terms, to come along to watch the trial that day, and she believed that Goering made an almost disastrous mistake in losing his temper with Dimitroff; the atmosphere, she says, became “demoniac.” 13
Goering felt the need to make a dignified retreat from the courtroom. Before he left he made a statement about the legal inquiry into the causes of the Reichstag fire which was taking place in London; at this inquiry, in which Sir Stafford Cripps played a prominent part, circumstantial evidence had been put forward that the Nazis, not the Communists, had fired the Reichstag.14 “I would like to know,” said Goering, “what the English, the French or the Americans would think if they were conducting a political trial and the Germans interfered in such a manner. And, as England has been made the home of this inquiry, I would like to suggest to the English that they study the history of the burning of their own Parliament a few hundred years ago. There they will see that a trial like this was not held. Even today the anniversary of this outrage is celebrated, and a straw effigy hanged to show that the place for such people is the gallows.” But the only man who could be found to face this fate in Germany after fifty-seven days of public examination of the evidence collected by Goering’s men was van der Lubbe, who through almost every moment of the trial had sat impassive, his face vacant. He alone, on January 10, 1934, shambled in a daze up to the block, where he was dispatched with an ax by the public executioner; the latter was dressed as tradition demanded on so formal an occasion, in full evening attire, with white gloves and a top hat.
Goering, furious at the way he had been treated at the trial, complained bitterly to Hitler that he had felt he was the person being cross-examined, not the Communists. Hitler replied that little could be done to change the nature of the courts of law while Hindenburg was still alive.
The election of March 1933 followed hard on the fire. Having set the machinery of his blind justice in motion, Goering, excited and roaring with energy, broadcast to the German people on the night of February 28 and then turned once more to the election campaign.
On March 3, two nights before Germany was once more pushed through the polls, Goering was shouting at Frankfurt am Main: “My measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking . . . I don’t have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more!”15 March 5 was designated the day of national awakening, and concentrations of marching men filled the streets; their thudding feet were to become the new heartbeat of Germany, while the endless rallies made the night hideous. The radio, with loudspeakers strung up in the streets, thrust the voices of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering into every ear. To vote against such heavy pressure was an act of courage, but on March 5 over twelve million votes were cast against the voices and the violence. But the Nazis and their allies, the Nationalists—led by Papen and Hugenberg—with a total of over twenty million votes cast in their favor, at once proclaimed a great victory, though their 240 seats gave them only a bare majority of sixteen in the Reichstag. As night fell, the bonfires of victory lit up the hills.
It was now, in March 1933, that the concentration camp system was fully established. Goering wished the camps to be thought of as rehabilitation centers for those suffering from varying degrees o
f political delinquency, but in any case the growing thousands placed under arrest made it impossible for normal imprisonment to be practicable. At Nuremberg, Goering testified that his orders were that “these men should first of all be gathered in camps—one or two camps were proposed at that time—because . . . I could not tell for how long the internment of these people would be necessary, nor how the number would be increased.”
The camps authorized by him (“two or three in Prussia”) were immediately supplemented by the so-called Wilde Lager, unauthorized camps set up by individual Nazis; Goering mentioned at Nuremberg a camp near Stettin set up by Karpfenstein, Gauleiter of Pomerania, another at Breslau established by Heines, and a third near Berlin, of which Karl Ernst (“whom I had always suspected of acts of brutality”) was the founder. Goering had these camps closed.
The history of the concentration camps will never be easy to disentangle. Goering claimed that he took the idea initially from the internment centers set up by the British during the Boer War, and in the German encyclopedia the word Konzentrationslager was followed immediately by “First used by the British in the South African War.” Goering put his own camps under Diels, and at Nuremberg he admitted that brutalities took place, adding, “Of course I gave instructions that such things should not happen. That they did happen and happened everywhere to a smaller or greater extent I have just stated. I always stressed that these things should not happen, because it was important to me to win over some of these people for our side and to re-educate them.” He then repeated the well-known story of his friendly treatment of the leader of the Communist Party, Ernst Thaelmann. Thaelmann had been beaten during interrogation, and Goering, hearing of this, had him brought to his office in order to express his regrets. “My dear Thaelmann,” he said, “if you had come to power, I would probably not have been beaten, but you would have chopped my head off immediately.” He then told Thaelmann he should always feel free to complain of ill treatment should it ever recur, and returned him to his captors. He had done what he felt best for the record of his humanity, but, as he said himself, “Wherever you use a plane, you can’t help making splinters:”
The early history of the camps is bound up closely with the deep personal rivalries between Goering, Roehm of the S.A., and Heinrich Himmler, head of the S.S. Goering, as we have seen, had control over the police of Prussia, which involved a large part of Germany, at the beginning of February, and had augmented their powers by recruiting a further fifty thousand auxiliaries from the S.A., the S.S., and the Stahlhelm. At the same time he had set up a secret police force, the political police, under Diels. While this was happening Himmler became police chief for Bavaria, which he regarded as a starting point for building up his own secret force, especially when it became evident that Hitler favored the idea of establishing a unified police force independent of the separate state administrations. Reinhard Heydrich, sportsman, S.S. member and dismissed naval officer, joined Himmler to screen the members of the force. To keep the Prussian political police under his own control, Goering removed them on April 26 from under the roof of the Prussian administration to separate headquarters at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, near his own ministry. In doing this, he laid the foundations for the future Gestapo, the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), as it became known officially when reconstituted in June 1933. He called himself “Chief of the Political Police and of the Secret Police.” Himmler meanwhile gradually took over the police of the rest of the German states and by the following year was able to represent successfully to Hitler that Goering’s Gestapo should be added to his own. As Goering put it at Nuremberg, “At that time I did not expressly oppose it. It was not agreeable to me, I wanted to handle my police myself. But when the Führer asked me to do this and said it would be the correct thing and that it was proved necessary that the enemies of the State be fought throughout the Reich in a uniform way, I actually handed the police over to Himmler, who put Heydrich in charge.” Himmler in fact took over officially on April 20, 1934.
Roehm, the leader of the S.A. directly responsible to Hitler, was developing ideas concerning the use of the S.A. which were diametrically opposed to those of Hitler and Goering. Roehm wanted the S.A. in effect to displace the Army, with himself as commander in chief; Hitler wanted to keep the Army firmly on his side and to let the undisciplined ranks of the S.A. gradually decline, since the political use of street fighting and rowdyism had become more of an embarrassment than a necessity with the consolidation of power. Goering also wanted ultimately to become Commander in Chief of the Army of the Reich. The S.A., however, had its own private accounts to settle, and with the suspension of civil liberties on February 28 Roehm and his men, as we have seen, began to set up their own concentration camps in more or less secret defiance of Goering’s official centers of detention. By the end of 1933 some fifty concentration camps were in existence—a somewhat different figure from Goering’s “two or three.”
The scandal of the brutality practiced in these camps slowly began to leak out. Beating was followed by blackmail; ransoms were charged to release prisoners from Schutzhaft, protective custody. Murder became common, and it was not difficult by 1933 to find many men capable of actively enjoying the exercise of sadism. If, on his own admission, cruelty was practiced in Goering’s camps and prisons, this was but the smoke that issued from the fires of pain that were being lit in the secret places controlled by the S.A. and the S.S. Both Hitler and Goering made a show of protest against these excesses, perhaps as a matter of formality. Dachau was founded by the S.S. in the spring of 1933, and in April S.S. men actually fired on Goering’s men when the latter attempted to investigate an unauthorized camp discovered near Osnabrück; Hitler on this occasion forced Himmler to intervene and break up the camp. Soon, however, Goering’s man Diels was to find himself outclassed by such violent Nazis as the Berlin S.A. chief Ernst, and Goering was to lose his power as the national police controller before the determined self-advancement of Himmler. Heydrich established an office in Berlin in direct defiance of Goering, the S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst—Security Service), a special secret service formed from the S.S. Goering by now had an active fear of Roehm, who had been made a member of Hitler’s Cabinet the previous December. He felt the need for alignment with someone who represented power, and he chose to ally himself with Himmler. By this time, in any case, Goering’s main power interest had turned elsewhere.
The story of Goering’s police activities cannot, therefore, be separated from his particular pursuit of power. He acknowledged his position as second man to Hitler in the new State that was being created, and his initial strength had been in the establishment of control through the police.
The new Reichstag was opened on March 21 at Potsdam with pomp and circumstance, preceded by services in both the Catholic Pfarrkirche and the Protestant Garnisonskirche. Speeches were made by the President and the new Chancellor before the altar in the Garnisonskirche; Goering’s own speech was reserved for his re-election as president of the Reichstag when that body assembled later in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin; he spoke of the holy fire of revolution and the need to unify Germany through Hitler. “Weimar has been overcome,” he said. “It is symbolic that the new Reichstag has found its way back to the town from which Prussia, and with Prussia Germany, sprang.” He reminded them that March 21 was the anniversary of the day when Bismarck had faced the first German Reichstag in 1870 and the German family had been reunited in a German parliament. On the same day decrees were promulgated granting amnesty for criminal acts committed by the Nazis during the period of struggle for power, and setting up special courts to deal with political offenses against the new regime. Three days later, on March 24, came the notorious Enabling Act, giving Hitler dictatorial powers in the State, and passed by a Reichstag assembly in which many members could not be present because they were under arrest. S.A. and S.S. men stood around, while Goering intimidated those deputies who showed hostility, by shouting, “Quiet! The Chancellor is settling accoun
ts!”
Early in April Goering went on holiday in Italy. There he met Mussolini, who warned him against the Nazi insistence on anti-Semitism ; various anti-Jewish decrees were being announced in Germany at this particular time. Italy, according to Mussolini, could not afford to support Hitler on this issue. Goering also met Marshal Balbo, head of the Italian Air Force. On April 10, while he was still in Rome, he received a telegram from Hitler appointing him Premier of Prussia and requesting him to take up his duties on April 20; Hitler thanked him effusively for his services and for “the unique loyalty with which you have bound your faith to mine.” According to Goering, this had been prearranged; as he told it later, “I also got Herr von Papen . . . to retire from his post of Commissioner for Prussia in order that the Leader could give the post to me.”16 Goering returned in good time to establish the future Gestapo on April 26.
Goering could now afford to expand his domestic life. He lived in his luxurious flat on the Kaiserdamm, which also served as a personal office; there were a Prussian police officer and an S.S. man on guard, and messengers from the various ministries streamed in and out. A side room off the main hall contained an oil painting of Carin seated on a green slope, surrounded by flowers and backed by snow-capped mountains. The room was decorated in blue-green and gold and richly carpeted. Underneath the portrait was a table with a bowl of flowers and two heavy brass candlesticks. The room was like a shrine.
Carin had now been dead for eighteen months, and Goering had hardened into a single-minded man living the life of a bachelor, with a retinue of official servants and underlings. It was at this time that Robert Kropp, who was to be his personal servant for the next twelve years, saw an advertisement that a valet was required by a gentleman occupying a very important position; the telephone number of an intermediary was given, and an appointment was arranged for Kropp after he had been warned that his potential employer was Hermann Goering. Goering kept him waiting some hours, then saw him and discussed his qualifications, inquiring if he could drive a car and pilot a motorboat. Kropp said he was able to fulfill both these requirements. Goering asked him what wage he wanted; Kropp requested the normal wage for a first-class valet, which was 140 marks a month, with residence. Goering thought for a moment and then offered him only ninety marks, but told him that if he proved good this wage would soon be raised. Goering warned him that the work would be hard and that he would have to be prepared for duty at all hours. Kropp, who was unmarried, agreed to the terms. Three months later his wages were doubled, with the increase backdated to the day he entered Goering’s service.”17
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