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

by J. Lee Ready

  Inner perimeter service was not for everyone. These guards were not just adversely affected by the increasing brutality, but also by the depressing nature of the workplace coupled with the dirty flea- and lice-infested prison huts that were their daily regimen. Oberfuehrer Berthold Maack did not fit in here. He was a veteran of the Great War, the Freikorps in the civil war, the German police, the Stahlhelm and the SA, and by profession a shopkeeper, and he had joined the SS in 1931. But why Eicke and Himmler thought he was suitable for a senior position at Dachau is unknown. He only lasted a few weeks and was then transferred to command the 39th Standarte of the Allgemeine SS at Koeslin.

  Nor was external perimeter guard duty for everyone. Unterscharfuehrer Adolf Eichmann, an Austrian refugee serving at Dachau, found it boring, and he applied for several transfers. Eventually he gained a position with the SD as a file clerk.

  However, Eicke was impressed by some of his inner perimeter guards, especially Rudolf Hoess. An educated man, who loved playing Mozart on his violin, a twice decorated and thrice wounded veteran of the Great War, Hoess was also as cold-blooded as they come. In 1924 during the French occupation of the Ruhr industrial area Hoess had joined several other nationalists to murder Walther Kadow, who had betrayed some of their colleagues to the French. Hoess was briefly imprisoned for this act, but to most Nazis he was a hero. Yet, he was apolitical and had never been an ardent Nazi. When Eicke saw him in action at Dachau, he made a mental note to nurture Hoess’ career.

  Himmler did not interfere with Eicke’s methods, but he retained nominal control over him, because Himmler began to aspire to control the entire political prisoner process in those regions such as Bavaria where Himmler’s police chief hat hunting had been most successful. Thus, if in Bavaria Himmler’s SD discovered a traitor, the man would be arrested by Himmler’s political police who would hand him over to Himmler’s SS KZL - Concentration Camp Service. There was no need for trials or lawyers in Himmler’s system. Moreover Himmler yearned to introduce this system throughout Germany.

  Eicke was soon so successful that in late 1933 Himmler began closing down the ad hoc camps set up by the SA in Bavaria, and transferred their inmates to Dachau.

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  Within Prussia Rudolf Diels was eager for power, and he had Goering’s support, so he too began closing down the SA concentration camps in that state, transferring the inmates to his own camp at Oranienburg run by the Gestapo. This was in fact a good thing for the prisoners, who received more lenient treatment at the hands of the Gestapo, men who were after all still true policemen and who had a modicum of respect for the law.

  In the first year of Hitler’s chancellorship more than 27,000 Germans were sent to somebody’s concentration camp. One of those bewildered prisoners was Armin Wegner, the author, who had been sentenced to five years. His crime? He had written a letter to Hitler asking him to reverse his anti-Semitism.

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  Naturally Roehm, the head of the SA, was angered by the dismantling of his camps by Himmler and Diels. He realized now that Himmler and Goering were his major rivals: he knew that Diels was a lackey of Goering. Roehm was also put out that Hitler had not given him a powerful position in the government. One might think that his position as commander of more than a million Stormtroopers would be enough, but he longed for a ‘legitimate’ government job. He chose to bide his time and concentrate on recruiting more SA members, and he now at least had government funds behind him. There would be no shortage of recruits, as there were still plenty of unemployed fathers with hungry kids.

  In July 1933 the Nazis outlawed all non-Nazi political activity and naturally this meant the dissolution of the various political ‘armies’. Suddenly millions of Germans had to face facts. Employment would be tied to political loyalty. Therefore, countless thousands of Communist Red Guards joined the SA. Their neighbors knew who they were, of course, and they were nicknamed ‘beefsteak Nazis’: brown on the outside, red on the inside. Roehm did not mind. He just wanted more warm bodies. He also gained the entire half million members of the Stahlhelm by the simple method of annexing that militia to the SA. So much for the ‘volunteer’ spirit that the Nazis bragged about.

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  Most Jews in Germany either owned their own business or worked for other Jews, a legacy from centuries during which Christians would not employ Jews. On 1 April 1933 Hitler ordered a national boycott of Jewish businesses, hoping to freeze them out economically so that they would emigrate. The boycott did not work. Most Germans ignored it. This taught Hitler that he would have an uphill climb in order to turn the people against the Jews.

  A few days later Hitler began removing civil servants, judges and local politicians who were known or suspected to be anti-Nazi. Many a man joined the Nazi party at this time just to save his job and therefore his family’s meal ticket. However, nothing a Jew did could save his job.

  Schools of higher learning were given a quota of no more than 1.5% Jews among the student body, which was still greater than their population percentage.

  These anti-Semitic laws increased weekly, and it was obvious that the Nazis were trying to force the Jews to emigrate. Many did so, soon at the rate of 4% per year.

  It must be remembered that anti-Semitic legislation was not shocking to the world. Even after a year of Nazi rule legal anti-Semitism was no greater in Germany than in many other countries. In the USA Jews were ‘restricted’ from entering many schools, restaurants, hotels, sports clubs and social organizations. The American comedian, Groucho Marx, made light of it, saying he was so fussy he refused to belong to a club that would allow him [a Jew] to become a member. But in private it hurt. A US Army officer Maurice Rose found his promotion prospects barred to him if he openly acknowledged his Jewish race, so he kept a low profile. In Britain Jewish storekeepers often had to relocate to other towns when the locals found out they were Jews and refused to shop with them. Fully half of Britain’s Jews lived in one neighborhood in London. In all English-speaking countries Jews altered their names to disguise themselves: Gruenewald becoming Greenwood, Weiss becoming White, Neumann becoming Newman and so on.

  In fact the various international Jewish organizations of the world spent as much time criticizing Poland’s treatment of Jews as they did that of Nazi Germany.

  As yet Eicke’s concentration camps had received Jewish inmates only because they had committed some form of ‘crime’, not because of their religion or race.

  Hitler’s race laws became purist for the sake of purity and, as the Nazis always emphasized physical exercise and healthy food, the extremists among them clamored for some kind of final solution to the question of those who were mentally defective or suffered from a birth defect that made them physically dependent upon others. Himmler saw his chance when the fanatics became serious about this and he began to support forcible sterilization laws for such people, so that they would not be able to pass on their mental or physical deformity to the next generation. The USA already had similar legislation.

  The Nazis did not invent the idea of racial superiority. That had been around since time immemorial, but ‘White Supremacy’ had increased in circulation in the latter half of the 19th century with the writings of such Englishmen as Francis Galton, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and H. G. Wells. Needless to say these authors were usually misquoted. In the USA this attitude had produced the Ku Klux Klan, and in Britain it led to the idea of the White Man’s Burden, namely that it was the duty of white men to look after the child-like ‘dark’ races, a policy that justified British military invasions of dark-skinned nations.

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  In November 1933 the Nazis held another election and this time won a whopping 92% of the vote. Even fanatic Nazis privately admitted the results must have been rigged.

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  Chapter Four

  AN INDEPENDENT SS

  Himmler longed for independence. This was one reason why he increased his job-hun
ting for police positions, collecting police chief hats like bric a brac. By spring 1934 Himmler was either chief of state police or chief of the state political police in every state in Germany, except for Prussia. In each state he placed SS men in key positions: e.g. he recruited the disbarred judge Werner Best into the SS and named him Police Commissioner of the state of Hesse. He appointed Bruno Streckenbach, an SS officer, to be head of the Hamburg political police.

  Some ordinary policemen did join the SS reserves, while retaining their jobs as cops, but Himmler did not press his luck by launching a recruiting drive among them. He believed that as long as he was their chief anyway they would do his bidding.

  It was different for the political police departments though, for they would be expected to arrest people not for a normal crime such as robbery, but for political disloyalty to the Nazi state. Therefore, Himmler insisted that in order to keep their jobs the members of the various state political police departments had to join the SS. Thus Wilhelm Harster, ex Freikorps soldier and currently deputy commander of the Stuttgart political police, became an honorary SS member. Within months he had been promoted to deputy commander of the Wurttemberg state political police and had reached the SS reservist rank of scharfuehrer. Even so, many political policemen refused to join the SS and they were dismissed or transferred to other police duties, but a few had expertise that was invaluable and were allowed to remain in place, despite their snub of the SS.

  Note that those policemen who did become SS reservists continued to use their police ranks, such as Wachtmeister.

  Already Himmler had influence in the Prussian police apparatus through the fact that Rudolf Diels, the head of the state’s political police (Gestapo), and Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Berlin police, were both SS reservists. Furthermore, Heydrich’s SD had several V-men in the Gestapo, including Arthur Nebe and Guenther Patchowsky. A promising young member of the Berlin SD was the twenty-six year old lawyer Wilhelm Behrends. Heydrich was not averse to recruiting members of the armed forces too. Walther Rauff the captain of a navy minesweeper was created a ‘part-time’ SD officer and SS hauptsturmfuehrer!

  However, it was the V-men in the SA who provided Heydrich with the most ‘ammunition’. Though Roehm had retained control of the SA, and nominally the SS too, he had not been offered a position in the federal government nor any state government, and this rankled the SA leadership. There were four million SA stormtroopers by spring 1934, including those drafted from the Stahlhelm and the ex-Communists, and they demanded they be given a piece of the action.

  Despite the fact that Bormann and Bouhler, who served in Hitler’s chancellery, were both SS reservists, Himmler did not have the ear of Hitler, though he claimed he did to his subordinates. In fact, Sepp Dietrich as head of Hitler’s bodyguard, the SS LAH, had easier access to the Fuehrer than did Himmler. Himmler kept an eye on Dietrich, as he did on many of his subordinates, because some SS officers were getting too big for their boots. When he suspected Hans von Kobelinski, the commander of the Berlin SD, of disloyalty, he busted him all the way down to SS Sturmmann {private}.

  Suddenly Hitler appeared to dash all of Himmler’s hopes, when just as Himmler was about to gain total police control in the various states, Hitler began steps to destroy the state governments and turn Germany from a federalist into a centralist nation with one national police force. Himmler intended to be the new chief of that force, but Goering and Roehm were also in the running. Which one would Hitler choose?

  A few days later Hitler mentioned to Goering that he was disgusted by Roehm’s continued homosexuality and his possible corruption of Hitler Youth members [teenage boys]. This was all that Goering needed. At once he contacted Himmler and they made a pact. In return for his support for Goering against Roehm, Goering would name Himmler as chief of the Prussian police.

  Thus in April 1934 Himmler officially took over the Prussian police, and at once he moved to Berlin and brought his own management team with him. This team was made up of Himmler’s most trusted henchmen: Heydrich, who still ran the SD; August von Meyszner a retired Austrian policeman, who had fled that country’s persecution of Nazis; the law professor Dr. Eberhard Schoengarth, who came to work in the Gestapo’s press department; thirty-three year old Heinrich Mueller, who would not only take over the Prussian Gestapo, but would be the new head of the Bavarian political police too; and Werner Best, an SD member and head of the Hesse police, who would become deputy head of the Gestapo. Meyszner soon joined the SS. Then resigned. Then joined again.

  Once ensconced in Berlin Himmler ordered all Gestapo personnel to join the SS, and he encouraged all senior Prussian police officials to join up too, though it was not required, but the rank and file cops would remain outside the SS. One exception was Wilhelm Keilhaus, a Great War veteran who had been serving in the Berlin police since the Civil War days, who suddenly took this opportunity to join the SS, but not as a cop, rather as a soldier in the SS LAH.

  As all Gestapo personnel were now officially SS they usually used SS ranks not police ranks. But of course old habits die hard. Thus many a Gestapo agent identified himself with his old police rank, such as kriminaldirektor. Then again a handful of indispensable agents that had refused to join the SS kept their jobs and police ranks.

  Yet Himmler could still not throw his weight around too much in Prussia. In fact Polizei Generalmajor Wolf the Count of Helldorf, an SA reservist, was not only allowed to continue in his position as chief of the Potsdam police without joining the SS, but within weeks Himmler promoted him to chief of the Berlin police, still without SS membership. Juergen von Kamptz kept his job in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior as a polizei generalmajor in the gendarmerie [rural police] without joining the SS. Thus again another lie, that Gestapo meant SS and SS meant Nazi. In truth not all Gestapo became SS, and certainly not all SS became members of the Nazi party.

  As part of his new job as chief of the Prussian police Himmler took over the Gestapo-run concentration camp at Oranienburg, and in July 1934 he promoted Brigadefuehrer Theodore Eicke to Inspector of Concentration Camps and told him to bring his Dachau-style up north. Upon Eicke’s inspection of Oranienburg, he ordered most of the Gestapo guards at the camp to be sent back to real police duties. They were happy to leave and willingly handed over their keys to Eicke’s SS KZL.

  Eicke now began taking over all concentration camps in Germany and closing many of the smaller ones. At the same time that Eicke was introducing his Dachau system to these camps, he also expanded his own private reservist paramilitary formation, raised from among the outer perimeter guards. These fellows would spend some of their time training for combat assignments and the remainder guarding the camps. Their barracks and training grounds were near but not inside the concentration camps. E.g. at Dachau the concentration camp was separated from Eicke’s ‘military base’ by a river. Eicke called these paramilitary formations the SS Totenkopfverbaende [skull bands]. The human skull was a very common German emblem and had no evil implications.

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  German spying activity outside of Germany had long been the sole responsibility of German military intelligence, the Abwehr led by Admiral Canaris. However, Heydrich’s SD began to delve into this sphere too. It was somewhat ironic that Heydrich was now challenging Canaris’ authority, for the two were friends and now that Heydrich had moved to Berlin they met almost daily, often for horseback rides. There was one difference between the two. Heydrich was totally without morals and slavishly followed Himmler’s and Hitler’s dictates. Canaris obeyed the Nazis willingly, but only because they were the government of the day. He believed many of the tenets of the Nazis, but considered Hitler to be completely insane.

  The SD’s involvement in foreign affairs centered on Austria and Czecho-Slovakia. The latter nation, in effect the Czech Empire, had been created by the British and French at the close of the Great War, so that they would have a friend in central Europe. But in order to create the empire they had to oppress millions of non-
Czechs, among them three million German-speaking Sudetens. These Sudetens had been Austrians until 1919 and by the 1930s still considered themselves to be Austrians. Though the Czech Empire was relatively democratic, the Sudetens naturally thought this was a despicable state of affairs and longed for reunification with Austria. Hitler thought likewise and he intended to right this wrong.

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  By the beginning of June 1934 the SA was somewhat at a loss as to what its purpose was. They were no longer being used to arrest overt anti-Nazis and they had lost their concentration camps, and this month Hitler ordered the entire SA to go on leave and sent the SA leadership on holiday, even booking hotels for them, trying to convince them this was a sort of pat on the back. Roehm was leery of this ‘award’. For one thing the SS was still part of the SA, but had not been put on leave. Still, he went. On June 25 Hitler suddenly mobilized the army and canceled all army leave. In answer to this obvious provocation several regional SA leaders mobilized their men. But the army was armed. The SA was not.

  In response Himmler called his regional Allgemeine SS leaders and SD commanders to his office in Berlin and secretly informed them that Roehm was planning a coup. On the 28th Himmler mobilized all SS and all policemen. He also arranged for the loan of small arms from the army to arm some of his SS.