Gestapo

by Edward Crankshaw

  Eight months later, on May 15th, 1937, Himmler, as Reichsfuehrer of the S.S. (RfSS), achieved a major objective. It was decreed that all rulings issued by his office were valid as Ministerial decisions. On November 11th, the peculiar affinities of the Gestapo and the S.S. Security Service (S.D.) were recognized by law:

  “The S.D. of the RfSS, as a Party and Reichs Government organization, has to carry out important tasks: in particular it is required to assist the Security Police [i.e., Gestapo and Kripo]. The S.D. is consequently active on behalf of the Reich; and this demands close and intelligent co-operation between the S.D. and the officials of the General and Interior Administration.”

  This decree was a logical outcome of a decree of June 23rd, 1938, which laid it down that all Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) personnel must be enrolled in the S.S. This meant, in effect, that the Gestapo, a State organization, was brought under control of the S.D., a Party organization.

  The final stage was reached in 1939 when Heydrich achieved his personal ambition. The Main Office of the Security Police in the Reichs Ministry of the Interior, the Gestapo and the Kripo that is, was taken away from the State organization and from the surveillance of the Minister of the Interior and merged into the Main Security Office of the S.S., which was henceforth known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or R.S.H.A., directly under Heydrich. The Gestapo became Section IV of this institution; the Kripo was Section V. The S.D. (home intelligence) was Section III; the S.D. (foreign intelligence) was Section VI. Sections I and II were concerned with Personnel and Administration.

  There was also Section N (Nachrichten), the all important technical communications section; and, later, when the S.S. was making its bid to duplicate the armed forces, Section VII, which was concerned with Scientific Exploitation, and set up its own rocket research station in rivalry to Peenemuende.

  In 1943 the circle was closed when Himmler himself became Reichs Minister of the Interior. By that time Heydrich was dead.

  This tabulation of dates and appointments is not irrelevant. It is of extreme importance for an appreciation of the interlocking responsibilities of the Gestapo, the Orpo, the Kripo, the S.D., and the S.S. in general. Great efforts have been made by interested parties to obscure the true picture. At one time and another members of all the organizations listed here have sought to disclaim all connection with each other. But the chain of command and the interlock are both unambiguous.

  The Orpo and the Sipo were connected through Himmler as Chief of Police. The leadership of the police and the rank-and-file membership of the Gestapo and Kripo were restricted to the S.S. The Gestapo and the Kripo formed part of the security service of the S.S., first under Heydrich, then under Kaltenbrunner. The S.S. under Himmler also provided the concentration camp guards (Death’s-head formations), the concentration camp administration (W.V.H.A.), and, later, the special S.S. divisions, the Waffen S.S., which fought at the front. The S.S. in the end became a State within the State, duplicating almost every aspect of the State administration. It captured the Intelligence services of the Armed Forces; it duplicated every administrative office; it duplicated even the most elaborate and costly research projects; it fought the armed services for supremacy all along the line, and in the end was winning. The Gestapo was its spearhead. In the end, as Amt IV of the R.S.H.A. under its shadowy chief, Lieutenant General Heinrich Mueller, who reported directly to Heydrich, it dominated the whole of occupied Europe, and it contained the following sections and subsections, which illustrate its range:

  All these came under Section IVA of the R.S.H.A. After the outbreak of war Section IVB was added to cover the occupied countries: IVB 1 for Western Territories; IVB 2 for Eastern; IVB 3 for South-eastern; IVB 4 for passes and identification. A special subsection, IVB A (Arbeit) was created to look after the employment of foreign workers; and another, IVB G (Grenze) to control Customs and frontier protection and inspection. R.S.H.A. Amt IVA 6a at the top of a letter-heading looks insignificant enough; but it stood for the immense system of card indices and dossiers which penetrated into the personal lives of every German citizen. R.S.H.A. Amt IVA 4b, again, was responsible for the rounding up, transportation, shooting, and gassing to death of at least three million Jews.

  There was no murdering of Jews, except incidentally, in the early days of the new Gestapo. Himmler and Heydrich were still maneuvering for the absolute power which would make Auschwitz possible. The Jews could be picked off when the time came. Meanwhile there were heavier antagonists. The German people as a whole had to be regimented; the Army had to be put in its place (Himmler and Heydrich had no illusions about the enduring quality of the Army’s gratitude to them for breaking the back of the S.A., especially when it dawned on the generals that Himmler was going to prove a far more dangerous and purposeful threat to the sovereignty of the Armed Forces than Roehm ever was); the power of the Churches had to be undermined.

  For the purposes of general supervision and repression the Gestapo modeled itself closely on the Soviety Secret Police. Himmler had at his command an extremely able police-officer, Heinrich Mueller, who became known as Gestapo Mueller, a close and devoted student of Soviet methods. Mueller was impressed by the efficiency of the internal spy system which had been perfected by the Soviet Government, the effect of which, ideally, was to isolate the individual by making it impossible for anybody to trust anybody else. He set to work to reproduce this system in Germany by more economical means.

  He built up a cell system which enrolled quantities of ordinary citizens as honorary part-time members of the Gestapo. Thus there was the Blockwart, the concierge, who had to report on the activities of every tenant in his apartment block. Every Air Raid Warden was also a corresponding member of the Gestapo. Every labor group had a Gestapo representative. And, on top of this, voluntary informers were encouraged by every possible means. As the Russians had discovered, there is nothing like the voluntary informer for creating a general atmosphere of unease and apprehension: he operates by personal spite, or by the desire to ingratiate himself with the authorities; he costs nothing; his information is usually valueless in any specific sense; but since every human being at some time commits some indiscretion, he enables the secret police to swoop where it is least expected (and often least needed) and give the desired impression of possessing an all-seeing eye.

  As far as the regular membership was concerned, there was no difficulty in recruiting. Any regular police official was liable to find himself drafted into the Gestapo as a matter of routine posting; and although a handful of individuals at one time and another avoided such postings, by open refusal, or by subterfuge, the average police official seems to have taken it as part of the day’s work and to have made no complaint, being prepared to carry out in the German manner the most atrocious orders without any sense of personal responsibility, or even involvement. There were also volunteers, of course, men like Heinrich Baab of Frankfurt, whom we meet later, who drifted into the regular Gestapo because the work suited them. Baab himself had been a Block supervisor in the S.A. He had volunteered as a Gestapo informer for fifty marks a month, proved his worth, and was then taken into the Frankfurt police for duties first with the Gestapo, then with the S.D. He was a loutish brute with a good working-class background, a man with a chip on his shoulder who found fulfilment in the uninhibited exercise of subordinate authority. There were many like him.

  But not all members of the Gestapo were trained Gestapo agents. There was a large corps of administrative officials who had no police training at all, but were simply civil servants: in 1944 there were some three thousand of these, or less than ten per cent of the regular force. There were a host of junior clerks and typists, many of them, and particularly in war-time, women, often the wives and relatives of regular officials. The so-called Executive Officials, the true Gestapo agents, formed just under half of the total force of forty thousand in 1944, and they were divided into various grades. First the Senior Grade civil servants, the Regierungsrat and the Kriminair
at, who were highly educated men. Then the slightly lower grade, beginning with the Kriminal Inspektor; then the medium grade, beginning with the Kriminal Assistant. All these, most of them civil servants by nature with an ingrained police outlook, were sent to special training courses at the Fuehrer School, where they were inculcated with the outlook and techniques of Gestapo Mueller. They were German officials called upon to carry out specialized work in accordance with the orders of Hitler, and most of them were convinced that all they were doing was their duty, which frequently called for harshness and an iron will.

  Mueller, who came to control and who built up this apparatus for Heydrich, will repeatedly appear by name in these pages. But we shall never meet him. He was the archetype of non-political functionary, in love with personal power and dedicated to the service of authority, the State. Although he was a high-ranking officer of the S.S. and had worked under Himmler from the moment he took office as Bavarian Chief of Police, it was not until 1939 that he joined the Party, and even then he took no stock in it. He worked anonymously, and he has left hardly a trace behind. We find his signature on orders authorizing the most atrocious deeds. We glimpse him once or twice in action, and are surprised to discover that this man without a shadow, this office bureaucrat, could walk about and use a gun. But we know nothing about him, neither where he came from nor where he went. Even his subordinate, Eichmann, the murderer of the Jews, who never on any account put his signature to a document, left behind friends and acquaintances who have given us vivid glimpses of the man. Mueller left nobody. We see him lunching at the Adlon Hotel with Heydrich, Nebe, Schellenberg, later with Kaltenbrunner. They are all dead. Even Willy Hoettl, who has things to say about most people, can tell us nothing about Mueller.

  One of the few recorded interviews with him is given us by General Walter Dornberger, the chief of rocket research at Peenemuende. In his memoirs Dornberger shows a marked talent for describing the most varied personalities and making them live. But Mueller defeats him.

  “He was the unobtrusive type of police official who leaves no personal impression on the memory. Later, all I could remember was a pair of piercing gray-blue eyes, fixed on me with an unwavering scrutiny. My first impression was one of cold curiosity and extreme reserve.”

  And yet it was a critical meeting. Himmler had been interfering with the management of the Peenemuende station (this was in 1944), and Dornberger had gone to Berlin to demand the release of two of his men who had been arrested for no apparent reason at all. Mueller’s behavior indicated how deeply he had been impressed by his Soviet model. He heard Dornberger out, and then, without warning, instead of arguing, came back with a counter-attack:

  “ ‘You are a very interesting case, General. Do you know what a fat file of evidence we have against you here?’

  “I shook my head in surprise. He raised his hand a few inches above the table. I couldn’t help asking him, ‘Why don’t you arrest me then?’

  “ ‘Because it would be pointless as yet. You are still regarded as our greatest rocket expert, and we can’t very well ask you to give expert evidence against yourself.’ ”

  There was some desultory discussion of General Dornberger’s alleged negligence and sabotage, and that was that. The only time Mueller showed emotion at this interview was when Dornberger referred to the arrests as being carried out by the S.D. This upset the Chief of the Gestapo: “As a general on the active list you should surely know the difference between the S.D. and the Gestapo.” Dornberger retorted that nobody knew the difference. Mueller gulped, but said nothing.

  He disappeared as silently as he arrived. We hear of him last in Hitler’s Bunker two days before the end. Professional as always, he had turned up in that madhouse on Hitler’s instructions to interrogate, as head of the Gestapo, the ex-riding-master Fegelein, the cousin of Eva Braun, and one of Himmler’s personal links with the Fuehrer’s inner circle. Fegelein had to be investigated because the news had just come to Hitler that Himmler had turned against him and was conspiring to usurp the leadership. It is characteristic of all we know of Mueller that he should not have been held compromised by the treason of his master.

  Mueller did his job, while Berlin rocked, shuddered, and disintegrated under the Russian artillery and Hitler prepared himself for the end. Then, with Fegelein shot for a conspiracy with which he had nothing to do—Hitler’s last execution—the chief of the Gestapo vanishes, whether to die in the streets of Berlin, to escape under an assumed identity to Austria or Spain or the Argentine, or to join the Russians he admired so much, we do not know. Willy Hoettl believes that he did just that. For some time he had been using captured Russian agents to communicate false intelligence to the Soviet armies, using their own codes and their own wireless sets; and it would have been entirely possible for him to enter into detailed communication with the enemy by this means without anyone being the wiser. Be that as it may, like a perfect civil servant, he went, leaving not a trace, his files totally destroyed.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Dustbin of the Reich

  If every member of the R.S.H.A. had been as efficient and careful as Gestapo Mueller it would have been very hard indeed to piece together the story of that remarkable institution. But many members were not. Documents with the signatures of Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, and even Mueller himself were found by the Allies all over Europe. These should have been destroyed when read by their recipients; but they were not. Further, prisoners from the concentration camps, many of whom had been interrogated by the Gestapo, lived in considerable numbers to tell their tales. These, too, should have been done away with before their release by the Allies; but, although Kalten-brunner and others gave orders for their liquidation, they survived. Finally, on a much smaller, yet decisive, scale, certain colleagues, associates, and subordinates of Mueller fell into Allied hands and satisfied some inner need either by denouncing their superiors and associates or else by confessing to all but unbelievable actions committed by themselves. These, had they been made of the stuff of Mueller, would have destroyed themselves or else gone into hiding; but they did not. So, all in all, the discretion of Gestapo Mueller was practiced in vain.

  It should not be thought that all his associates were captured. Some committed suicide, like Himmler himself; many others—a remarkably high proportion, indeed—simply disappeared, like Mueller, and have never been heard of again. Nor did all those who were captured allow themselves the luxury of confession. For example, Kalten-brunner, Heydrich’s rather dreary successor, sourly refused to admit his complicity in anything at all, even when confronted with his own signature and his own photograph in what might be called compromising contexts. Others sought to put all the blame onto their colleagues. Some succeeded in this; but some did not—like the gentlemanly and well-dressed Dr. Lindow of sub-section Ia of the Gestapo, who busied himself with Russian prisoners-of-war, and, two years after his release from formal internment as a second-degree Nazi, was shocked and outraged to find himself suddenly under arrest for mass murder. But there were others who felt the need to confess, and described their activities, and those of their associates, with conscientious care and in clinical detail.

  These were various. There was the imposing figure of S.S. Lieutenant General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Higher S.S. and Police Leader of the Central Russian front, and, as such, immediately responsible to Himmler for everything that happened behind the fighting armies in his immense command. There was one of the star performers among Heydrich’s bright young men, an intellectual thug, the brilliant young economist Otto Ohlendorf, who became an S.S. Major General and head of the domestic S.D., the German version of those Oxford dons who did so well in the British Intelligence during the war; unlike his English, or Scottish, or Welsh counterparts, he got out of his depth and found himself commanding one of Heydrich’s notorious Action Groups (Einsatzgruppe D), and later admitted responsibility for the murder of over ninety thousand Jews in Southern Russia, men, women, and children. There was S.S.
Captain Dieter Wisliceny, a trusted aide of S.S. Colonel Eichmann (Chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish Office (R.S.H.A. Amt IVA 4b)) in his task of delivering the Jews of Europe to the gas chambers.

  It was Wisliceny who related at Nuremberg how Eichmann had told him that he would kill himself if Germany lost the war, and “would leap into his grave laughing, because the feeling that he had five million human beings on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.” (Eichmann could not help boasting, even in terms of horror, as Mr. Reitlinger in his monumental and terrible study of the attempted extermination of European Jewry has shown: he personally did not have a hand in more than three million murders. Most would be well satisfied with this; but Eichmann, like so many of his compatriots, had to exaggerate, even to himself.)

  There was S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Franz Hoess, not a member of the Gestapo or the S.D., and so inferior. As Commandant of Auschwitz, however, he was a particular crony of Eichmann’s and his chief customer; later, he became Deputy Inspector of Concentration Camps under S.S. Lieutenant General Gluecks. Gluecks vanished, but Hoess was caught and hanged. There was Helmut Naujocks of the S.D., a plainclothes expert, who only killed for a useful purpose, but who was able to throw some light on the conspiratorial aspects of the Gestapo: his modest contribution to history was the faking of the frontier incident which started the world war.

  There were others: so many, that, in spite of the silences of Gestapo Mueller, the picture builds up; it is time to look at it.

  At Nuremberg they did not talk about the activities of the Gestapo: they talked about its crimes. They listed these crimes in a manner which makes for convenient reference, and, at the same time, offers a useful and comprehensive survey of the ground we have to cover. The best list was provided by Colonel Story of the United States Prosecution. When he speaks of “the conspiracy” he means the Nazi conspiracy, first against Germany, then against the world: