“At the end of September, Diels was removed from office with the lightning swiftness common to all Nazi actions. The Gestapo chief was assigned to the post of assistant police commissioner of Berlin; but he sensed that his career was in a bad way and thought it better to fly to Czechoslovakia on a false passport. Nebe and I, who had persistently intrigued for his removal, breathed more freely.”
But not for long. Diels has himself described at length and with some pathos his feelings in exile and the highly patriotic motives which induced him to return. We have no reason to doubt that he felt homesick in Prague. He also wanted to get on in the world, and Berlin was the place for that. And so, says Gisevius, “From his retreat in Bohemia he threatened embarrassing revelations, and asked a high price for keeping his mouth shut. By the end of October he had moved in again.” This rings true, and it is also the only reasonable explanation of Diels’ power over Goering. Diels himself describes how after Goering had “pleaded” with him to return he, Diels, demanded extensive guarantees and a free hand. For the time being he had both. And it was at this moment that Goering, who had now succeeded von Papen as Prime Minister of Prussia, quite unconstitutionally removed the Gestapo from the Ministry of the Interior and continued to run it, through Diels, as his private police force.
“I can still see Nebe collapsing into his chair when he returned from the Ministry with the bad news,” writes Gisevius, who, however, was made of sterner stuff. “My immediate reaction was to decide that I must not sleep at home that night. So I hid in a hotel; and that was fortunate for me, for the hangmen were already out looking for me.”
Next day he decided to throw himself on the protection of Kurt Daluege. Instead of going to his own office in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, he went off to the Ministry of the Interior and slunk in through a back entrance. Nebe, who knew Daluege very well, joined him there, and together they went up to Daluege to decide what to do. They could not think of anything. One of Daluege’s subordinates, who had gone with them, also in fear of his life from Diels, had the bright idea that Diels should be called over to the Ministry for a conference and then, when he appeared, Nebe and Gisevius should “grab him and throw him out of Daluege’s third-floor window.” But even as they discussed the pros and cons of this expedient the door opened, and Daluege’s secretary came in to tell them that a Gestapo agent was waiting outside and wished to arrest Gisevius—“in the office of the Chief of Police, of all places!”
But the Chief of Police, Daluege, did not seem to share the indignation of Gisevius at this sacrilege. “In fact, the spark of courage that remained in him seemed to go out.” He was finding it difficult to make up his mind whether Diels or Heydrich was going to win the next round—and in any case neither Heydrich nor Diels had any use for Gisevius. “Nevertheless, he was generous enough to show me how to escape through an emergency exit.”
What to do next? With presence of mind Gisevius remembered his original protector, Grauert, who had been put into an under-secretaryship at the Ministry of the Interior by Goering in the flush of his first purge. “Grauert was not a man to get excited easily,” reports Gisevius. “Yet even he was somewhat put out.” He told the egregious young man that everything would be all right, he would see to that; and meanwhile he had better go home and wait for things to blow over. But this Gisevius flatly refused to do. He would not budge from the sanctuary of Grauert’s office—until, at last, Grauert agreed to ring up Goering, who “pretended to be outraged by what had happened and ordered a strict investigation.”
Three days later Gisevius was back again in his own office, still a member of the Gestapo. And there was Diels to welcome him:
“My dear fellow, what a shocking misunderstanding! I knew nothing about it at all. It was all a piece of insolence on the part of the S.A. You’re my very best adviser!”
Diels’ own account of the events that led up to his precipitate flight from Germany, referred to by Gisevius, is part and parcel of the same mood. One night round about midnight he was rung up by his wife, who was in a highly agitated condition. Their apartment had been broken into by a gang of roughs who had locked her up in her bedroom while they went methodically through their belongings and carried off what they wanted. Diels hurried home and was able to establish that the gang of roughs must have been a well-known S.S. Group under a certain S.S. Captain Packebusch which had recently been active in various parts of Berlin as a self-appointed anti-Communist mobile squad. Packebusch was used by Daluege to do his dirty work.
Not only was this aggravating to Diels in principle, since he himself was the great expert on Communism, but also, worse than this, Nebe had been telling the S.S. that he, Diels, of all people, was a Communist in disguise. Gisevius insists that his beloved Nebe, a simple soul, really believed this. But while there is every excuse for believing almost anything of Diels, there are certain things that those who knew him really could not have believed: and one of these was that Diels would ever associate himself with a losing cause. He certainly had a curious relationship with the German Communist leaders, Thaelmann and Torgler. This was probably in essence no more than the sort of attraction which so often binds together deadly adversaries in a private duelist’s universe. But there may have been more behind it than that.
In the interests of his career, Diels had deserted his chief among the Social Democrats, Sievering, for von Schleicher. He had deserted von Schleicher for Goering. There had been a time when nobody could tell whether the Nazis or the Communists would win; and it is conceivable that during this period of uncertainty Diels, with his deep knowledge of the Communist Party in Germany and his personal acquaintance with its leaders, may have deliberately left himself several lines open. We do not know. All we know is that a man with Diels’ established record cannot justly complain if, when in doubt, we believe the worst of him. Certainly on that winter’s night Captain Packebusch of the S.S. had broken into the flat of the Chief of the Gestapo in the hope of discovering incriminating documents linking him with Communist leaders. He failed, and Diels acted with resolution.
As soon as he had decided whom he was dealing with he telephoned an old friend, Commandant of the Tier-garten Police Station, a man “who had often helped me in the past, and was not afraid of his chief, Daluege.” The old friend responded, and, within an hour, the house in the Potsdamer Strasse, where Packebusch “carried on his unholy activities at Daluege’s behest,” was surrounded by members of the uniformed police, armed with hand grenades and automatics. Diels, according to his own account, himself stepped forward to knock on the door. An S.S. sentry opened, and, taking Diels and the little group at his heels for friends, showed them the way to Packebusch’s rooms, Diels still leading.
“I chose to expose myself in this affair,” he writes, “because, in the last resort, it was my own personal interest that was at stake. The most dangerous part of the enterprise now lay before me: the arrest by my own hand of the worst of the gangsters.”
It was a dramatic moment. There, in the small hours, sat the S.S. Captain—
“the very prototype and image of the later concentration camp commandants, harshness and callousness written deep into his face. He sat there, brooding over the papers on his desk like a scholar working into the night.… They were my papers he was working on, and defacing, as I soon discovered, with inept annotations.…
“Packebusch had no time to recover from his shock. He stared at me as though I were a ghost. As I said, ‘I’ve come to take you away,’ the uniformed police who had entered with me seized him without particular gentleness. They removed the pistol from the belt he had hung up on the wall with his black uniform jacket. His accomplices, in turn, were seized in their own rooms.”
But by the time Diels had got Packebusch to his own office on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse it was a different story. They started roaring and shouting defiance at each other. Diels threatened Packebusch with prison, and Packebusch threatened Diels with arrest for treason.
“As I jumped up
to refute this insolence he pulled an automatic from his trousers’ pocket and pointed it at me, yelling unprintable obscenities. But before he could steady his aim and press the trigger the great Alsatian dog which had been observing the progress of the scene from his corner of the big room threw himself at the jackbooted thug.” [Diels, as usual, was in civilian clothes.] “Two policemen wrenched the weapon from his hands.”
The upshot of that evening’s entertainment was that with Himmler protesting to Goering and calling for the blood of the Chief of the Gestapo, it looked as though the S.S. had won. But there were obscurities in the case, almost certainly involving scandals among the high and mighty of the Nazi Party. Diels was demoted, fled to Czechoslovakia, returned in triumph to a stronger position, himself accepted rank in the S. S., and managed to hold out against Heydrich for several months to come.
While the police leaders fought each other for power, the work of the police went on. And always the Gestapo was being strengthened. These incidents in the lives of Gisevius and Diels are recorded here not for their own sakes but to illustrate the atmosphere inside Gestapo headquarters in its early days. To the outsider the building in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse was the headquarters of a smoothly functioning terror machine. To the victims it was a pit of organized torture and injustice in which their bodies, and sometimes their spirits, were broken by remote inquisitors who knew how to be affable and bland when occasion called for it and how to beat and kick a man until he whimpered for mercy when occasion called for that. But the remote inquisitors, as we have seen, had problems of their own.
The sorting out of these problems reflected the development of the Gestapo from a small private instrument in Goering’s own war against all comers, from Communists to the S.A., into the dread and comparatively streamlined apparatus, which, partnered by the S.S. Sicherheitsdienst, was ready to apply its deep experience to the subjugation of occupied Europe.
It is clear, however, from the illustrations already given, that there can be no sorting out of those problems. We are dealing with the struggle for power between rival gangs, and there is nothing more tedious and repetitive. There are no records left to speak of, and if records exist in full they would not be worth losing time over. It is enough to establish the nature of the soil which nurtured the Gestapo, and from which it sprang. And it is only by appreciating the utter demoralization of the German police force, a regular body which should have had a proud tradition, but which had not, that we can understand how that arch-gangster and master of iniquity, Reinhard Heydrich, the type of adventurer without a shadow, was able to seize the whole apparatus after barely a year of quiet application to the task, with such effortless ease.
The members of the regular German police were civil servants, reflecting the moral condition of their country as a whole no less clearly than civil servants everywhere. Diels was given his chance because of the general demoralization. He failed; but after the war he came back, and for some time held office in the Ministry of the Interior of the Bonn Government.
Chapter 6
Confusion as a Fine Art
It is time to take a wider view, to look beyond the building in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, and to see the burgeoning Gestapo in relation to the administrative pattern as a whole.
If the reader finds himself muddled by the strange over-lappings and divisions of authority and executive power, he may be assured that he is in good company: the Germans themselves were also muddled. Even at Nuremberg, with its remarkable gathering of forensic talent, the court never succeeded in unraveling the tangle and laying bare the outlines of the hierarchy—for the very good reason that no rigid outline ever existed. In the light of accumulated knowledge we can get a clearer picture than was possible at Nuremberg; but it will only be to find that behind the apparently iron front of Teutonic organization there was a sort of willed chaos.
It will be for each reader to decide for himself to what extent the confusion was deliberate and calculated, to what extent it was spontaneous and involuntary. Be that as it may, the Germans have brought to a high pitch the art of evading responsibility by losing all sense of it in total confusion; and it comes to much the same thing in the end whether the fostering of such confusion is due to calculated cunning or a more generalized intellectual dishonesty. The general impression created is of a system knocked together in an ad hoc manner by the members of a ruling caste intent on reinsuring themselves, never content to commit themselves finally to a single course, but forever contriving to hedge and lay off.
Confusion first arose from the dualism of the German police as such, and was magnified by the equivocal role of Himmler.
Strictly speaking, until the Nazis completed their centralizing action, there was no German police. Germany was a Federal Republic, and the various States, or Laender, as well as a number of important municipalities, ran their own police forces. There was indeed a Reichs Ministry of the Interior (R.M.d.I.), but this had little effective power and was a shadow compared with the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Prussia, in theory, was one Land among others; but in fact it controlled two-thirds of Germany and dominated the whole. The capital of Prussia was also the capital of the Reich. Only one other Land, Bavaria, was ever strong enough to assert its own independence to any effect.
When Hitler became Chancellor, he knew very well that with Goering in control of the Prussian State Administration and the Prussian Police he would soon be able to do what he liked with Germany. Von Papen, when he agreed to serve as Vice-Chancellor, was also aware of the importance of Prussia and reserved to himself the office of Minister President, with Goering at the Ministry of the Interior as technically his subordinate: he would be able, he thought, by this means, to curb Goering’s activities, and thus Hitler’s. What he failed to see, however, was that Goering, with the apparatus of Prussian State power under his hand, would be serving the leader of the Nazis, who also happened to be Chancellor of the Reich, not the Minister President of Prussia, his constitutional superior. So von Papen was by-passed by his own police, and through that same force Hitler achieved more or less absolute control over Prussia as his first step to dictatorship over Germany as a whole.
Germany, by the standards of other Western countries, had long been over-policed. In Prussia the plainclothes branches had consisted of the Criminal Police (Kripo), a sort of C.I.D. (headed by Artur Nebe, the secret Nazi), and the Political Police, or Stapo, a sort of Special Branch (taken over by Diels and turned into the Gestapo). The uniformed police consisted of the Order Police, or Orpo, who lived in barracks in the large cities and were used as mobile squads for use in case of rioting and strikes; the Protective Police, or Schupo, the equivalent of the ordinary urban constabulary; the Gendarmerie, who acted as a constabulary for rural areas; and certain specialized forces—the Fire Police, who ran the fire brigades, and the Railway and Water Police. All these bodies, some of which were concerned with duties carried out in other countries by voluntary associations or local councils, were run for the Prussian Minister of the Interior by a supreme head, the Chief of Police in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, and, in his hands, constituted a formidable body.
We have already encountered S.S. Lieutenant General Kurt Daluege, and we shall encounter him again. We have spoken of him as Himmler’s personal agent in Berlin. But here is another source of confusion. He was technically responsible to Himmler only as the leader of the Berlin S.S. His official position was Chief of the Prussian Police, under Goering; and Himmler, as Chief of the Bavarian Police, had no jurisdiction over him in this capacity. His first task in Berlin was to carry on Goering’s purge of doubtful elements of the police, replacing them with old Party men and members of the S.A. and the S.S. (which was then still a part of the S.A.). Until Goering put the Gestapo under Himmler in April, 1934, Daluege was technically the superior officer of Rudolf Diels, a fact which makes the scene in his office when Gisevius and Nebe discussed the feasibility of throwing Diels out of the window, a project suggested by Dalu
ege’s own lieutenant, even more extravagant than may at first sight have appeared.
Daluege’s second task, however, was to assist Himmler and Heydrich to realize their aspiration of getting control of the Prussian Police. And in this task he worked against Goering. The unseating of Diels was part of the general plan; and the incident of Captain Packebusch was an attempt in this direction. It was not until April of the following year that Diels was finally got rid of on the pretext that he had been plotting against Goering, and Himmler was formally installed in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse as Deputy Chief of the Prussian Gestapo, Goering still retaining for reasons of prestige, as well as one other reason which we shall come to later, the nominal office of Chief of the Prussian Gestapo. By that time the opposition to the Nazi advance had been crushed and trampled to death, in the streets, in the rigged law-courts, in the bunkers of the S.A. and the torture barracks of the S.S., in the concentration camps and in the cellars of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse under Rudolf Diels. The new Deputy Chief of the Gestapo was able to concentrate on smashing the radical wing of the Party itself, led by Ernst Roehm at the head of the S.A.
This brings us to a further source of confusion: the structure of the S.S. and its relationship to the State administration. This confusion, as we have seen, existed from the first day of the Nazi revolution. January 30th, 1933. The Gestapo itself developed and ramified steadily in an unpredictable way for the next three years. It did not, however, receive an official stamp and sanction—so that, one might say, judicial and administrative confusion became a basic plank of State policy—until 1936 when Himmler, already Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. and Chief of Political Police throughout Germany, was formally inducted as Chief of German Police. Only then was the oppressive apparatus of the State and of the Party brought under one hand—thus providing a perpetual source of alibis for all who served under Himmler in any capacity whatsoever, and making the letters of his style the most terrible initials in the history of Europe: RfSSu.Ch.d.d. Pol.im.R.M.d.I.
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