Gestapo

by Edward Crankshaw

  The headquarters of a Bds consisted, typically, of five sections.

  “Administration” and “Economic affairs” sounds harmless enough; but the one would on occasion find itself concerned with the supply and maintenance of gassing vans; the other with the supply of forced labor and the disposal of gold from the teeth of executed prisoners.

  The drive, it will be seen, save in certain cases, or when the Higher S.S. and Police Leader was an exceptionally strong and vigorous character, came from the BdS, who was usually a Colonel or a Lieutenant Colonel, but might also be a Brigadier. Some of the better known BdS were S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Hahn of Warsaw; S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Fuchs of Belgrade; S.S. Colonel Knochen of Paris; S.S. Major Lange of Latvia; S.S. Brigadier Naumann of Amsterdam; S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Witiska of Slovakia. These men, and dozens of others, were Heydrichs in little. They were energetic, hardworking, and professional. They worked sometimes hand in glove, sometimes at loggerheads, with their Higher S.S. and Police Leader. As a rule the latter was content to suggest, rather than to order, except in particular cases (above all in Poland). The normal chain of command was Himmler—Heydrich (later Kaltenbrunner)—Mueller—BdS. Often, but not always, orders were repeated for information to the Higher S.S. and Police Leader. The BdS was always supposed to consult with his nominal superior; but frequently he only did this if the intervention of a high-ranking S.S. officer was needed with, for example, the Higher Command of the Army.

  If this is confusing, the Germans have only themselves to blame. The whole set-up was confusing in the extreme, and was almost certainly intended to be so. Confusion, furthermore, extended all down the line.

  For the BdS, or Chief of Security, himself had a dual command, and over certain aspects of it he sometimes had no more jurisdiction than the Higher S.S. and Police Leader might have over him. In the first place, he had his own headquarters staff, with its separate sections for Gestapo, Kripo, etc.; in the second place, he had his “out stations”—the KdS and the inferior Sipo posts covering his whole area. But the members of his headquarters staff were by no means exclusively staff officers, giving orders to, as it were, the policemen in the field.

  In a manner highly characteristic of German organization they mingled paper work with active investigation and interrogation. Just as Hitler astounded all his subordinates by interesting himself in affairs of minute detail, remote from him in place and time, even to the fate of individuals, so, all the way down the line in the apparatus of tyranny, high-ranking officials were apt to turn from their in-trays, which contained documents for their signature which would move armies or condemn whole populations to death, and interest themselves directly in some particular segment of the vast mosaic of destruction. Gestapo Mueller himself would frequently take time off to conduct a special interrogation, and the same was true of the area and local Sipo chiefs throughout occupied Europe.

  Thus each BdS ran his own office, supervised the subordinate offices throughout his area, and took an active hand in interrogations. His own office, his miniature R.S.H.A., was run by section heads, all of whom were liable at any moment to turn themselves into practical policemen in the Nazi manner. So that there was no clear-cut chain of command, and in the great Gestapo network which covered Europe it could never be predicted with any certainty which individual official would be found dealing directly and in detail with which particular offense.

  The matter was complicated still further by the special position occupied by certain subsections of the office of the BdS. While the Gestapo was Section IVA, within the Gestapo was the usual range of subsections; and one of these, IVA 4b, which was the Jewish office, led a private existence of its own almost completely outside the normal hierarchy. The BdS had virtually no control or, indeed, sometimes no detailed knowledge of the activities of the junior official who, on paper, was a wholly subordinate officer, usually with the rank of S.S. captain. In all matters relating to the deportation and resettlement of Jews the departmental head of IVA 4b received his instructions directly from Berlin, from IVA 4b of the R.S.H.A., which was housed in a separate building and run by S.S. Colonel Eichmann. The chain of command here was rigid: Hitler—Himmler—Heydrich (later Kaltenbrunner)—Mueller—Eichmann—then straight out, by-passing the Higher S.S. and Police Leader, by-passing the BdS or other regional Sipo Chief, to Eichmann’s local representative, who had virtually unlimited power.

  Section IVA 4b in Paris, for instance, was run by an obscure and pedantic little creature called S.S. Captain Dannecker, who was absolutely responsible for deporting the French Jews to the concentration camps and the gas chambers. He had a harder task than most of his colleagues in other lands because the French were difficult, and to the end he could never understand why even the most pro-German Vichy officials insisted on regarding French Jews as Frenchmen first and Jews afterwards. But, although he was a comparative failure, Dannecker had all the power of the Nazi State behind him. He did not have to work through his nominal chief, Colonel Knochen, though he frequently did so. When he required the assistance of the Army he simply went to General von Stuelpnagel and told him what he wanted. So that we have the remarkable spectacle of this fussy and terrible captain of the S.S. at one moment laying down the law to the elderly Field-Marshal, the next strolling down to the Velodrôme d’Hiver to supervise personally the round-up of unfortunates.

  It was the same with Eichmann’s emissaries everywhere. S.S. Captain Fuenten in Amsterdam, S.S. Captain Guenther in Prague, S.S. Captain Hunsche in Hungary, S.S. Major Krumey in Vienna, S.S. Captain Zoepff at The Hague, S.S. Captain Wisliceny in Slovakia, Greece, and Hungary again—all these, and many more besides, conducted their apalling operations nominally as subsection heads of the Gestapo, actually as the executive officers of a large-scale special operation directed from Berlin. Nor were Eichmann, himself, and his deputy, S.S. Major Brunner, content to sit at their desk. All these staff officers of the Gestapo seem to have been ridden by the demon of conscientiousness; and we find Eichmann careering about all over Europe to make sure that his instructions are understood, that no Jew shall escape the net, to keep his subordinates up to the mark, and to browbeat and argue with reluctant governments. This unremarkable lieutenant colonel was ready to bully, to flatter, or to lie. The Hungarians, for example, he bullied into sending two hundred fifty thousand Jews to his gas-chambers. But to the Slovaks, who showed concern, he lied, explaining that the Jews were simply to be resettled in special ghettos and would live in comfort and ease in their new homes.

  In saying that the Eichmann organization was largely independent of the nominal chiefs of the Gestapo, the last thing intended is to suggest that these did not know what was going on. Most of them were almost certainly unaware of the scale and range of the extermination camps; but all knew they existed; and all, at one time and another, were called to co-operate with the IVA 4b specialists in arranging for the round-up and deportation of the Jews.

  We find Dannecker, for example, elaborately reporting the progress of his actions to his Sipo chief, Knochen; and when Dannecker had been taken away from Paris for corrupt practices (nothing to do with Jews: this inconspicuous little man took it into his head to start a chain of night clubs on the side) we find his successor, S.S. Captain Roethke, conferring with Knochen about one of the most unspeakable actions of the war.

  This was the case of the four thousand fifty-one Jewish children who were seized with their parents during the great Paris round-up of July, 1942. Nearly seven thousand children and adults were herded into the bleak spaces of the Velodrôme d’Hiver. For five days they had no food, and the only water available came from a single street hydrant. There were ten latrines for the seven thousand. There were many pregnant women, a number of whom gave birth. Many individuals went noisily off their heads, and thirty people died. There they waited while Knochen and Roethke discussed in a leisurely manner with the Vichy officials what was to be done with the children. On the fifth day the mothers were taken away, leaving their chi
ldren behind, to start the long journey to the gas chambers on the other side of Europe. D’Arquier, the Vichy official, held that the children should be spared and sent to French orphanages. But Knochen and Roethke took their duties more seriously. Plainly the children should be exterminated too. The only snag was transport. But Eichmann, active as ever, had been busying himself in Berlin, and wired to say that he had been able to arrange for enough transport to take the four thousand fifty-one children to Auschwitz too. So, torn from their parents, inadequately looked after by other internees—mainly the very old and the sick—the children were taken to the transit camp at Drancy, the French railhead for Auschwitz, and, three or four hundred at a time, put on the trains, and trundled off to death.

  This action took place not in Eastern Europe, but in Paris, and not under pressure of any Allied advance, but in the summer of 1942, at leisure, and with Germany seemingly victorious. Many people have said that Knochen was a good fellow. No doubt by some standards he was, but the standards are not high enough.

  It is clearly impossible, however hard one may try, to limit the responsibility for the worst activities of the Sipo to certain kinds of grades of officials. The responsibility is indivisible. Routine administrative officials were required to co-operate with Captain Nowak, Eichmann’s transport officer, in arranging for the transports which took the Jews to Poland. An apparently innocuous official in the administrative branch, Rauff, was responsible for supplying and servicing the gassing vans. And so on. Nor, it may be believed, were the Germans concerned with who was and who was not responsible. They were simply obeying orders, and indeed they were; and there was nothing else to be done.

  S.S. Major General Ohlendorf of the S.D. put the matter very clearly at Nuremberg. Confessing to the murder of ninety thousand Jews when, at the age of thirty-five, he commanded Einsatzgruppe D on the Russian Southern Front, he was asked by the Defense Counsel for the Gestapo whether he had ever felt scruples at the tasks he was required to carry out. He answered, “Yes, of course.” “And how was it,” Defense continued, “that they were carried out regardless of these scruples?” Ohlendorf replied, “Because to me it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry out orders given by the leaders of the State.” And when he was questioned further about the legality of such orders, Ohlendorf replied, perplexed, “I do not understand your question; since the order was issued by the superior authorities, the question of legality could not arise in the minds of these individuals, for they had sworn obedience to the people who had issued the orders.”

  They were thus absolved in advance from blame for anything they might be called upon to do.

  And yet it was not so simple as that. Nobody has any right to demand that another man shall risk his life by standing on his own ideas of right and wrong (it should be remembered, nevertheless, that many of the Gestapo’s victims did precisely this, and died as a result). It may reasonably be asked, however, that if a man decides to massacre innocent women and children as ordered from above he should be clear in his own mind whether he is acting in accordance with a philosophy of obedience, for which he would be ready to go to the stake, or to save his own skin. And it is a fair criticism of the Ohlendorfs that they never seem to have begun to consider this question: obedience and self-preservation were hopelessly mixed up in their minds. It may also be reasonably objected that even if an individual decides that he must carry out the commandments of authority and massacre women and children, it is not incumbent on him to act with excessive zeal: the Gestapo almost invariably acted with excessive zeal and obeyed their instructions not only in the letter but also in the maniacal spirit of their originator.

  They had plenty of opportunities for saving the lives of their victims and some shreds of their own self-respect by going easy. Instead, they competed with one another in frightfulness. Ohlendorf, when asked by the Prosecution why his Einsatzgruppe had accounted for fewer Jews than the other three, replied that he thought that his fellow-leaders exaggerated the number of their killings. Eichmann, we know, exaggerated considerably the number of Jews he had sent to the gas chambers. And, indeed, throughout the early stages of the Russian campaign, there was a strongly competitive mood: just as the various armies were inclined to exaggerate the amount of ground and the number of prisoners they had taken, so the back-area scavengers exaggerated the number of civilians they had massacred. There was, as far as is known, no order from Hitler about this: the Gestapo and the S.D. thought it up for themselves.

  Again, while the Gestapo was above the law, so that there could be no appeal from its decisions, this very fact enabled it, had it so desired, to go easy. But it did not; nor did it welcome determined opposition to its actions by a few brave men, an opposition which, had its reluctance to carry out Hitler’s orders been genuine, it could have magnified on occasion into an insurmountable barrier (for there were limits to what the Gestapo could get away with when confronted with opposition) and an excuse for doing nothing.

  For example, at a conference between the Army and the Gestapo held shortly after the opening of the Russian campaign the question of screening Soviet prisoners-of-war with a view to executing the undesirables was under discussion; there was a good deal of military objection to this programme, but Mueller was adamant. He insisted that the order must be carried out to the letter, and the only concession he made to the soldiers was that the executions, to be carried out by recruits under command of the Gestapo, should not take place in the presence of troops, in deference to their sensibilities. Mueller, had he wished to soften this order, or even to postpone it, could at least have used the opposition of the soldiers as a means of gaining time; instead, he rode them down, not, it seems, because Hitler so instructed him, but because he would have the support of Hitler if it came to a showdown.

  Again, the head of the Gestapo for Silesia, Dr. Mildner, came into head-on collision with the Chief Public Prosecutor at Katowice, early in the Russian campaign, when the Germans were still apparently winning. The Public Prosecutor went so far as to protest to the Reichs Minister of Justice at the summary hanging of alleged Resistance leaders “without notification to the competent court.” Mildner fought back. He not only said that the past executions were imperative but went on to declare that “with the authority of the RfSS [Himmler]” (not, it will be noted, “under instructions from Himmler”) “these executions by public hanging at the place of the crime” would have to be continued in the future until all the opposition had been destroyed.

  As a final example, it has been pleaded that the head of the Paris Gestapo, S.S. Colonel Knochen, strongly disapproved of some of the more spectacularly cruel methods he was called upon to practice. But in Paris it was easier than anywhere else in Europe for a reluctant Gestapo official to practice obstruction and ca’ canny. It was known and understood in Berlin that the French required very delicate handling, involving concessions on the German side unthinkable in Eastern Europe. It was known in particular that they showed an incomprehensible reluctance to connive at the deportation and murder of their Jews, and sometimes showed both boldness and ingenuity in frustrating Eichmann’s plans.

  Against this background S.S. Colonel Knochen, had he really been as kind and gentle as his apologists declare, could have exercised a very strong influence for good. But he did not. For example, in the matter of the Jewish children, torn from their parents by Roethke, with the help of Colonel Knochen’s men, and condemned to those four ghastly days and nights in the cycle-racing stadium, we find the Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, d’Arquier de Pellepoix, pleading for the children to be sent to orphanages and Knochen supporting Roethke in his insistence on deporting them to Auschwitz. D’Arquier himself was a poor and craven creature, who must have been driven to desperation to argue with Knochen: he had recently been given the job because his predecessor, Xavier Vallat, had proved too obstructive and had defeated Dannecker’s efforts at every turn, and because the Vichy Chief of Police, Bossuet, refused to have anything to do
with deporting French Jews. Nothing could have been easier than for Knochen to report that it was against German interests to murder the children of French Jews. Nothing could have been more true. But Knochen, the mild and reluctant Gestapo chief, insisted on their being murdered according to the book.

  Chapter 13

  Terror and Extermination

  The activities of the Gestapo and the S.D. in occupied Europe fell broadly into two categories: terror and extermination. For the fulfilment of both they depended materially on the assistance of other organizations; on the Concentration Camp Administration (W.V.H.A.) run for Himmler by S.S. Lieutenant General Pohl and staffed by the S.S.; on the Waffen S.S.; on Daluege’s Orpo; and, to a lesser but highly variable extent, on the Wehrmacht.

  Heydrich would have preferred it otherwise. If he had been able to get his own way he would have centralized the whole apparatus of tyranny and massacre on his R.S.H.A. For example, quite early in his career he made a determined effort to get personal control of the concentration camps, and it was even written into the Law of February 10th, 1936, formally setting up the Gestapo, that it should be responsible for their administration. But this was never put into effect. Himmler reserved the concentration camps for himself, and there is no doubt at all that in withholding them from the Gestapo he was deliberately working to prevent Heydrich from becoming too powerful. He was content to use Heydrich’s gifts, his drive, his ruthlessness, his boldness, and his imagination; but he had no intention whatever of allowing Heydrich—or, for that matter, anybody else—to become his deputy and rival.