Gestapo

by Edward Crankshaw

  The torturing, as such, took place invariably at the interrogations of prisoners and suspects in the Gestapo offices. After interrogation the victims were, equally invariably, either sent to a concentration camp or killed. The ostensible idea of the interrogations was to make the victim talk—not, as with the Soviet interrogations, to make him confess to his own crimes, but to make him say what he knew about others. More often than not—in fact, nearly always—the interrogations were conducted with extreme clumsiness and lack of finesse. It is not to be expected that the Heinrich Baabs would be very good at cross-examination; but it is remarkable that the “gentlemen” Gestapo officials were not much better. Even when they had a fairly clear idea of what they wanted to know, as when they had captured a known Resistance leader, they seem to have brought a minimum of subtlety to the interrogation, relying on the effect of one or two questions repeated to infinity against an accompaniment of battery and torture. On the rare occasions when battery was not used for reasons of high policy they still shouted and threatened to produce an atmosphere of terror, and seemed at a loss for the next move if the victim did not succumb.

  Captain Best, one of the chief figures in the Venlo incident, who from the moment of his kidnapping with Major Stevens from Dutch territory by a dubious individual who turned out to be none other than Schellenberg himself, was treated very much as a privileged prisoner, was one of the few who were interviewed by Gestapo Mueller in person and lived to tell the tale. Mueller, too, shouted, like any Baab (Captain Best, who knew the Germans as well as he knew himself, gives the German word for this shouting technique: anschnauzen or snorting) and Captain Best’s description of Mueller in action is the only one extant:

  “Mueller was a dapper, exceptionally good-looking little man, dressed in imitation of Adolf Hitler, in a gray uniform jacket, black riding breeches and top boots. He started his ‘snort’ immediately he entered and, as he walked towards me, increased the pitch and the volume of his voice with great virtuosity. He managed to get right up close to me before his vocal chords tore into shreds. ‘You are in the hands of the Gestapo. Don’t imagine that we shall show you the slightest consideration. The Fuehrer has already shown the world that he is invincible and soon he will come and liberate the people of England from the Jews and Plutocrats such as you. It is war and Germany is fighting for her existence. You are in the greatest danger and if you want to live another day must be very careful.’ Then he sat down on a chair in front of me and drew it up as close as possible, apparently with the intention of performing some mesmerizing trick. He had rather funny eyes which he could flicker from side to side with the greatest rapidity and I suppose that this was supposed to strike terror into the heart of the beholder.”

  Best also met Heydrich, who shouted too:

  “Almost as soon as I entered a young and very resplendent officer whom I recognized as Heydrich (his enlarged photograph hung in every room) jumped up and started shouting at me in a most threatening manner:

  “ ‘So far you have been treated as an officer and a gentleman, but don’t think that this will go on if you don’t behave better than you have done. You have two hours left in which to confess everything. If you don’t, I shall hand you over to the Gestapo, who are used to dealing with such gangsters and criminals—you won’t enjoy their methods a bit.’

  “I turned to Mueller, who was standing at my side and asked, ‘Who is this excitable young officer?’ At this Heydrich really went off the deep end and literally foamed at the mouth; at all events, he sprayed me liberally with his saliva. Mueller quickly pushed me out of the room and into my own. Later on he came in again and told me I must not take the matter too seriously: ‘Soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked.’ “

  It is only fair to Mueller to record these impressions of Best, as well as his conclusion: “In my experience I always found Mueller a very decent little man.” But this verdict of a British officer who exhibited a remarkable talent for getting on with the Germans is the last good we shall hear. As a rule the interrogation of the Gestapo was a prelude to the concentration camp and slow, laborious death, or to immediate killing.

  The battery usually began with arrest and continued intermittently until the more formal tortures were started. The general object of knocking prisoners about even before interrogation started seems to have been to break their nerve by shock tactics and so daze and humiliate them that they would never have a chance to recover: they were knocked off balance, in a word, and only the bravest or most insensitive ever found their feet again: it is hard to be calm and collected and lucid when your face is streaming with blood, your eyes are closed up, your lips swollen and your front teeth adrift; and when with every word you try to say you are knocked down again and kicked as you try to get up it is very hard indeed to retain a balanced view. So this was the almost universal preliminary treatment, though whether a drill laid down in Gestapo regulations or a custom spontaneously generated among the like-minded it is impossible to say. The torture began with the interrogation proper.

  The basic torture was flogging, and this was the only form of torture ever admitted to by the Germans. Numerous members of the Gestapo, among them the all-too-familiar Heinrich Baab, told of the existence of an R.S.H.A. order authorizing in exceptional cases a treatment called “Rigorous Examination,” which was to consist of not more than twenty-five blows with a stick. Corporal punishment of up to twenty-five blows “on the loins and buttocks” was also authorized in the official “Concentration Camp Statutes,” and records were to be kept. The Yugoslavs, however, found a blank form used by the Gestapo and the S.D. in Slovenia which was intended to be filled in to cover “especially rigorous interrogations.” This contained a space to be filled in by the authorizing official: “The especially rigorous interrogation should consist of … Minutes of the interrogation should be kept. A doctor may (or may not) be asked to be present.”

  We do not know exactly what the central office of the R.S.H.A. had in mind in the way of “especially rigorous” torture. But it clearly had something. And we do know what in fact happened.

  One of the most comprehensive first-hand descriptions of the Gestapo’s methods of torture was given by the Frenchman, M. Labussière, a schoolmaster, and a captain of the reserve. His testimony was presented by the French Prosecuting Counsel at Nuremberg, and it concluded with a general statement of the methods used:

  “(1) The lash.

  “(2) The bath: the victim was plunged head-first into a tub full of cold water until he was asphyxiated. Then they applied artificial respiration. If he would not talk they repeated the process several times consecutively. With his clothes soaking, he spent the night in a cold cell.

  “(3) Electric current: The terminals were placed on the hands, then on the feet, in the ears, and then one in the anus and another on the end of the penis.

  “(4) Crushing the testicles in a press specially made for the purpose. Twisting the testicles was frequent.

  “(5) Hanging: the patient’s hands were handcuffed together behind his back. A hook was slipped through his hand cuffs and the victim was lifted by a pulley. At first they jerked him up and down. Later, they left him suspended for varying, fairly long periods. The arms were often dislocated. In the camp I saw Lieutenant Lefevre, who, having been suspended like this for more than four hours, had lost the use of both arms.

  “(6) Burning with a soldering-lamp or with matches.

  “On July 2nd my comrade Lalbue, a teacher from Cher, came to the camp. He had been subjected to most of these tortures at Bourges. One arm had been put out of joint and he was unable to move the fingers of his right hand as a result of the hanging. He had been subjected to flogging and electricity. Sharp-pointed matches had been driven under the nails of his hands and feet. His wrists and ankles had been wrapped with rolls of wadding and the matches had been set on fire. While they were burning, a German had plunged a pointed knife into the soles of his feet several times and another lashed him with a whip. Phosphor
ous burns had eaten away several fingers as far as the second joint. Abscesses which had developed had burst, and this saved him from blood poisoning.”

  It is unnecessary to pile horror upon horror. The instances of this kind of torture are innumerable. They may be found in quantity in the documents submitted by the French and Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials, and in the reports of hundreds of lesser trials. There were variations in detail from place to place. In Russia, for example, the Gestapo were especially fond of immersing their victims in barrels of icy water until they drowned or were frozen to death. Different Gestapo chiefs would have their own variants of the technique of hanging up by the wrists. What might be called the Kiev-Pechorsky variation was to twist the suspended victim round and round until the rope was tightly knotted, and then let go, so that the rope unwound in a dizzy rush. Most inquisitors preferred the rubber truncheon to the whip, and used it to break bones. Some preferred the more sophisticated machines to the boot and the bludgeon. There were iron bands which were placed round the head and contracted; and there was a special apparatus for mangling the wrists and ankles, consisting of rings set with alternate balls and spikes which could be tightened by a screw. There is no known case of the use of the rack; but in every other way the torture chambers of the Gestapo were better equipped than the dungeons of the Medieval tyrants and inquisitors. A favorite activity was to torture a woman within hearing of a male prisoner under interrogation and to pretend that the woman was his wife.

  It is desirable to repeat that these were not the innocent excesses of the psychopaths who ran the concentration camps, each of whom was a law unto himself. They were the prescribed routine of innumerable Gestapo prisons in all the occupied countries of Europe. The Chief of German Security in Denmark, S.S. Colonel Bovensiepen, admitted that the order to use torture “in certain cases” certainly originated from the higher authorities in Berlin. And the general instruction was that torture could be used to compel persons to give information that might serve to disclose subversive organizations directed against the German Reich, but not for the purpose of making the delinquent admit to his own deeds. Even Bovensiepen, however, insisted that the means prescribed were limited to a certain number of strokes with the rod. He did not explain the extraordinary unanimity of the more elaborate methods of torture employed throughout the whole of occupied Europe.

  As far as it is possible to establish, however, the general instruction that torture was only to be used to make the victim speak about his colleagues seems to have been fairly rigidly adhered to—though not in Germany itself. The chief victims of torture were members of Resistance groups and partisans, and they were questioned about their companions and tortured if they refused to speak. There are few known instances of a man or a woman being tortured to make him confess to his own misdeeds. On the other hand, most of the examples known to us involved questioning at random.

  Anybody picked up by the Gestapo would immediately be assumed to have some knowledge of subversive activity, even if nothing positive was known against him. And he would be questioned, stupidly and aimlessly, often about subjects of which he was totally ignorant. In other words, he was tortured on the off chance that he might know something. And, once started, and firmly based on their instructions from Berlin, the local inquisitors, the Gestapo Commissars and Secretaries, as they were called officially, would find it very hard to stop. If a man had nothing to say under mild torture, the pressure would be increased, and frequently he was dying, or dead, before his interrogators could bring themselves to conclude that he had nothing to tell them at all. The torture might go on for days—and end only with the victim being shot as good for nothing.

  So the Gestapo had it both ways. Sometimes, if for a technical reason—as when an arrest had been made on neutral territory—the Gestapo wished to avoid shooting a man outright they would smash his body and leave him lying in the middle of a public road to give the impression that he had been run over. When a man was not killed, torture was simply a prelude to the concentration camp, where as often as not he died.

  Chapter 12

  The Gestapo Goes to War

  The organization of tyranny in the occupied countries was elaborately conceived and prepared in fine detail before the outbreak of war. The German police, like every other Nazi institution, was put on a war footing in 1938, and the attachment to each Wehrkreis inside Germany of a Higher S.S. and Police Leader was a part of this development; for the Wehrkries, or military district, was to serve as the base for extraterritorial expansion.

  Technically the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders were Himmler’s own representatives with the military commanders and the civil governors of their areas; but they varied very much from place to place in quality, character, and attack. As a rule they held the rank of S.S. general or major general. They were the hard core of the Nazi “old fighters,” and they ranged in background from the promoted sergeant-major to the dug-out retired officer who had decided to go in with the Nazis for reasons of idealism or expediency. On the whole they were tough and apt to be stupid and extremely heavy in the hand. They represented the victory of the S.S. over the civil administration, and they owed their positions to the desire of the Nazi leadership to reward the faithful for their services in the wilderness. By the professional policemen like Mueller, Nebe, Best, and others, who ran the Security Police—the Gestapo and the Kripo—they must have been regarded as a lot of blundering old men who had no comprehension of police matters—with certain notable exceptions, such as S.S. Lieutenant General Franz Jaeckeln and others of his colleagues in Poland and Russia, who by their energy and ruthlessness set an example even to the Security Police and the S.D.

  To the bright young men of the S.D. they must have appeared as denizens of another world. But character and opportunity counted for a good deal and although there were undoubtedly a number of Higher S.S. and Police Leaders who were not active or interfering and hardly knew what was going on, and although there were others who were simply corrupt in a rather elephantine manner and chiefly concerned with loot, the most energetic among them were fully worthy of the organization they were privileged to adorn and succeeded in having a finger in very many pies.

  Their opportunities varied with the nature of the problems presented by their particular commands. In Denmark, for example, S.S. Colonel Bovensiepen was not much more than a repressive chief constable, often at loggerheads with the emissaries of the Gestapo and S.D. In Russia, on the other hand, where the front was far from static and there was much partisan warfare, men like von dem Bach-Zelewski, Jaeckeln, Herff, and Pruetzmann took their jobs very seriously, acted in liaison between Himmler and the Army, and entered with determination and enthusiasm into their task of terrorizing the back areas, and massacring Jews, Commissars, and other undesirables.

  In Poland outside the annexed areas, in the General Government that is, where an extremely energetic civilian Governor was charged with the task of starving the masses into submission, killing off their natural leaders, and liquidating the Jews, there was clearly immense scope for displays of energy. Thus S.S. Major General Katzmann, based on Lvov, actively supervised the killing of four hundred thousand Jews in East Galicia, while S.S. Lieutenant General Odilo Globocnik, the butcher of Lublin—“dear old Globus,” Himmler’s crony—officially organized and carried out “Action Reinhard,” the story of which will later be told.

  In Yugoslavia, where there was constant chaos and much internecine strife of great bitterness, a man like S.S. Lieutenant General Thomas of Belgrade (and Globocnik again, when, after cleaning up Poland, he was sent to Trieste) was a professional and well-equipped hangman functioning among a mob of amateurs.

  In France, on the other hand, S.S. Lieutenant General Kurt Oberg found himself inevitably involved in politics of an extremely delicate kind and, in the intervals of shooting hostages, deporting Jews, and torturing the Resistance leaders (all of which activities General Oberg is said to have disapproved of), found himself involved in
complicated tangles with Vichy, the German military Governor, the German Ambassador, and the fire-eaters on the staff of the Sipo.

  The exact position of the Higher S.S. and Police Leader has never been defined. This vagueness contributed to the fog with which the whole German police organization was enveloped. At the same time it is reasonable to assume that Himmler created the office as part of a deliberate plan to prevent Heydrich from completely dominating the whole apparatus of repression—a plan which also denied the Gestapo control of the concentration camps, although Heydrich had taken active steps to obtain such control by putting them under a parallel organization, under S.S. Lieutenant General Pohl, known as the Economic Administration Main Office (W.V.H.A.). The Higher S.S. and Police Leaders were superior in rank to the Gestapo representatives in their area, the chief of which were attached to their own, staffs. For at the headquarters of each Higher S.S. and Police Leader there were to be found the direct representatives of Heydrich (Security Police, or Sipo) and Daluege (Uniformed Police, or Orpo). Inside Germany, these were known as Inspectors of Sipo and Orpo (IdS and IdO); outside they were known as Plenipotentiaries, or Befehlshaber (BdS and BdO). The BdS was, in effect, the head of a miniature Prinz Albrecht Strasse, which was set up on the Berlin model in certain cities of occupied Europe. Thus, in Paris, there was the Higher S.S. and Police Leader for Northern France and Belgium, Oberg; and on his staff, as BdS, S.S. Colonel Helmuth Knochen, directly responsible for all the Gestapo and S.D. of his huge area. Scattered through the country the BdS had his deputies, known as Commanders of Sipo, or KdS, each with his own headquarters. Below the KdS were the Leit-stellen and Stellen—main and subsidiary command posts of the Sipo.