Gestapo

by Edward Crankshaw

  Then the victims would be driven into the chambers with their hands held high so that more could be squeezed in, and the children were piled up on top of them. The Sonderkommandos would have to work like fiends to deal with the packed mass, and, as they worked, the S.S. overseers would be flogging them with sticks and rubber truncheons to make them work faster, while, outside, because they could not be packed in, others would be moving among the waiting victims, gathering them into little groups and shooting them down then and there to save space. It was this kind of pressure which proved the inadequacy of the crematoria, and it was found quicker by far, though also more conspicuous, to flood the bodies with petrol and burn them in the open. At the Lueneberg trial it was stated by Dr. Bendel that all five furnaces of Crematorium No. 4, so ingeniously constructed by the firm of Toepf of Erfurt, could consume only one thousand corpses a day, whereas in open pits, with petrol, they could burn the same number in an hour.

  None of the people we have lately encountered belonged to the Gestapo, which here, as in other matters, cannot serve as an alibi. On the other hand, every man, woman, and child in that fantastic death-factory was consigned there by the Gestapo.

  Chapter 17

  Night and Fog in the West

  It is said sometimes of the Gestapo, and not only of the Gestapo, but also of the S.S. in general, and of those members of the Armed Forces and of the civilian bureaucracy (they may fairly regard themselves as an ill-used minority) who have been unable to escape being implicated in the slaughter of the Jews and the Slavs, that they had become so conditioned to regarding these people as not people at all, as subhuman types, that they felt not merely no compunction in removing them from the earth but also a positive pride. This contention has a basis of truth. We remember Himmler’s description of the extermination of the Jews as a delousing operation, and we may cite the words of S.S. Lieutenant General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski at Nuremberg, when asked to comment on the massacres of the Einsatzgruppen: “I am of the opinion that when, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race and Jews not even human, then an explosion of this sort is inevitable.” Bach-Zelewski was an educated man, an old soldier, a Higher S.S. and Police Leader in charge of operations on the Rusian Front, and a member of the Reichstag from 1932 until the end.

  We shall return to this view later. The point to be made immediately is that the Gestapo, the S.S., and others did not confine their extraordinary activities to people whom they considered inferior or subhuman. They operated with equal cruelty against the nations of the West. It is true that there was no campaign of extermination directed against, for example, the French; but this was due to a political decision made by Hitler. We have no reason to doubt that had the Fuehrer decided to eliminate ten million Frenchmen in order to make room for Germans, the relevant organizations, including the Gestapo and the S.D. would have carried out his orders, even thought they had not been taught for years that the French were subhuman. Indeed, although extermination of whole sections of the population was never practiced in Western Europe—always excepting the Jews, whom the people of several nationalities, and especially the French, perversely insisted on regarding as their own compatriots—there were some by no means inconsiderable massacres, not only of civilian populations but also of prisoners-of-war; and on those occasions when the Gestapo were required to act with severity against groups and individuals, there was nothing to choose between their behavior in Bourges and their behavior in Borisov. Only those who think that, in these days, individual murder must be multiplied a thousand-fold before it may be considered reprehensible will find any fundamental variation in the general attitude and behavior of the Gestapo wherever it happened to be stationed. If there is some confusion about this, it may be found to be due very largely to the invention of a new word to describe what was, at Nuremberg, considered to be a new crime: the word genocide, which may be seen as one of those camouflage terms. It is meant to sound formidable; but in fact it serves all too well to conceal the simple fact of murder.

  There was plenty of murder in Western Europe, but no genocide. Most of it took place—always excepting the mass-murder of the Jews—when Germany was hard put to it to hold her own against the Allies; and most of it came into the category of kiling for punishment, or as a deterrent, rather than into the category of killing to exterminate. There was the shooting of hostages on a large scale, to cow the spirit of resistance; there was the torturing and killing of individuals suspected of sabotage; there was the killing of prisoners-of-war, mainly British, who made a nuisance of themselves; there was the killing of captured parachutists and Commandos, mainly British, to discourage the others. There were special expedients, such as the decree which instructed the police not to interfere with angry crowds when they started lynching Allied bomber-crews who had been shot down, or such as the notorious Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree, which provided that all suspected resisters who could not be shot out of hand were to be sent in conditions of the utmost secrecy to Germany, where their fate would be concealed, even after death, from their families—the object of this being to create an atmosphere of secret and mysterious terror inimical to the spirit of resistance. In all these operations the Gestapo and the S.D. operated in the foreground, as in the rounding-up and deportation of the Jews—not, as they were compelled to do at Auschwitz and elsewhere, in the background at comparatively long range.

  At Nuremberg on February 4th, 1946, the courtroom was suddenly invaded by a sense of humanity. Until then the onlookers had become so attuned to tales of wickedness and horror that their feelings had been numbed; and even when, as very often, they were required to listen to the pitiful evidence of individuals, ordinary men and women who had been assailed by the Nazi machine, but had miraculously escaped, the scale of inhumanity was so immense that the personal disaster seemed to count not as a human tragedy but simply as one more squalid item in the tremendous case being so laboriously assembled. But now, for once, there was a real human being speaking and in language all could understand: the Belgian scholar, the historian, van der Essen, General Secretary of the University of Louvain.

  Nothing much had happened to Professor van der Essen. He had had a lucky war. His beloved university library had been wrecked by the Germans, but he had not been hurt, and he had moved about, a free man, during the whole period of the occupation. He was detached from the suffering all around him (if he had allowed himself to participate he would have gone mad) and, his body unbroken, his mind unclouded, and in no immediate personal fear, he was in a position to observe the afflictions of the less fortunate. Thus his evidence, though unspectacular and almost dull, in which he gave an account of life as lived in the shadow of the Gestapo, has a point and actuality which helps to make sense in the catalogue of horrors to which we must soon return.

  “I think I understand,” said M. Faure, a member of the French Prosecution, who was later to become Prime Minister of France, “that you yourself were never arrested or seriously worried by the Germans. I would like to know whether you consider that a free man, against whom the German administration or police have nothing in particular, could during the Nazi occupation lead his life in accordance with the concept a free man has of his dignity?”

  So this rare, this almost unique, apparition at Nuremberg, a man who had neither suffered physical violence nor inflicted it, set himself earnestly to trying to give a sober impression of the German occupation as experienced by a man with nothing to fear. He held the court. His story on the face of it was an anticlimax; but in fact it underlined more than anything else the reality behind the fantasy of murder and cruelty which, until then, had dominated the whole proceedings. He started off by saying that he weighed eighty-two kilos “before May 10th, 1940, before the airplanes of the Luftwaffe suddenly came without any declaration of war and spread death and desolation in Belgium.” He now weighed sixty-seven kilos. There was that small fact to begin with. One of the German defense counsel, who failed
to sense the mood of the court, Herr Dr. Babel, tried a remark that was half a joke and half a sneer: “During the war, I also, without having been ill, lost 35 kilos. What conclusion would you draw from that, in your opinion?” There was laughter in court, but the President cut in, “Go on; Dr. Babel, we are not interested in your experiences.”

  Professor van der Essen said:

  “I don’t want to dwell on personal considerations or enter into details of a personal nature or of a theoretical or philosophical nature. I should like simply to give an account—it will not take more than two minutes—of the ordinary day of an average Belgian during the occupation.

  “I take a day in the winter of 1943: at six o’clock in the morning there is a ring at the door. One’s first thought—indeed we all had this thought—was that it was the Gestapo. It wasn’t the Gestapo. It was a city policeman who had come to tell me that there was a light in my office and that in view of the necessities of the occupation I must be careful about this in future. But there was the nervous shock.

  “At seven-thirty the postman arrives bringing me my letters; he tells me that he wishes to see me personally. I go downstairs and the man says to me, ‘You know, Professor, I am a member of the secret army and I know what is going on. The Germans intend to arrest today at ten o’clock all the former soldiers of the Belgian Army who are in this region. Your son must disappear immediately.’ I hurry upstairs and wake my son. I make him prepare his kit and send him to the right place. At ten o’clock I take the tram for Brussels. A few kilometres out of Louvain the tram stops. A military police patrol makes us get down and lines us up—irrespective of our social position—in front of a wall, with our arms raised and facing the wall. We are thoroughly searched, and having found neither arms nor compromising papers of any kind, we are allowed to go back into the tram. A few kilometres farther on the tram is stopped by a crowd which prevents the tram from going on. I see several women weeping, there are cries and wailings, I make enquiries and am told that their men folk living in the village had refused to do compulsory labor and were to have been arrested that night by the Security Police. Now they are taking away the old father of eighty-two and a young girl of sixteen and holding them for the disappearance of the young men.

  “I arrive in Brussels to attend a meeting of the academy. The first thing the President says to me is:

  “ ‘Have you heard what has happened? Two of our colleagues were arrested yesterday in the street. Their families are in a terrible state. Nobody knows where they are.’

  “I go home in the evening and we are stopped on the way three times, once to search for terrorists, who are said to have fled, the other times to see if our papers are in order. At last I get home without anything serious having happened to me.

  “I might say here that only at nine o’clock in the evening can we give a sigh of relief, when we turn the knob of our radio set and listen to that reassuring voice which we hear every evening, the voice of Fighting France. ‘Today is the one hundred and eighty-ninth day of the struggle of the French people for their liberation,’ or the voice of Victor Delabley, that noble figure of the Belgian Radio in London, who always finished up by saying, ‘Courage, we will get them yet, the Boches!’ That was the only thing that enabled us to breathe and go to sleep at night.”

  It is very quiet and unsensational, and Professor van der Essen was not hurt. And yet so many aspects of Gestapo rule are there, just below the placid surface. The knock at the door, which is not the milkman; the son being packed off into hiding at a moment’s notice; the round-up of ex-soldiers to be sent to concentration camps or forced labor; the seizing of hostages—the old man and the young girl, for shooting in case of need; the arrest of university dons in broad daylight in the streets of Brussels and their disappearance into Night and Fog; the listening to the nine o’clock news from London—but in French, not English—because the English intonation would be noticeable in itself, and listening to the English wireless meant arrest.

  Professor van der Essen was not an innocent. He knew what was going on. He was not an active resister, but it was only luck that saved him; the luck of not being a Jew that saved him from almost certain death; the luck of not being picked up as a hostage that saved him from probable shooting, certain imprisonment. ‘When hostages were taken it was nearly always university professors, doctors, lawyers, men of letters.” This was a settled policy. It was laid down for the whole of occupied Europe that hostages, to be shot if a German was killed, often in the proportion of one hundred to one, were to be people who were well known in their districts, well liked, and certain to be widely missed.

  And behind these actions were the men who, on the other side of Europe, were slaughtering millions in conditions of inconceivable “barbarism and calling their slaughter a delousing action.

  It was in France, after the total occupation, and at a time when the Resistance had become serious, that the local commanders of the Gestapo and the S.D. showed that they were made of the same stuff as the Globocniks, the Kruegers, the Mildners, and the rest. And, as in the East, they found they could always call on the Waffen S.S. and nearly always on the Wehrmacht. In the closing stages of the war, when the Germans were on the run, the Gestapo could not begin to cope with the militant Resistance, and then the Waffen S.S. as at Oradour-sur-Glâne, carried out by themselves the sort of actions which they had so often practiced in the East.

  But earlier the Security Police and the S.D. were able to manage fairly well on their own. They maintained a constant pressure of terror, which might strike at any time. Professor van der Essen was extremely lucky:

  “Professors from Louvain were sent to Buchenwald, to Dora, to Neuengamme, to Gross-Rosen, and perhaps to other places too. I must add that it was not only professors from Louvain who were deported, but also intellectuals who played an important rôle in the life of the country. I can give you immediate proof. At Louvain, on the occasion of the reopening ceremony of the university this year, as Secretary General of the University, I read out the list of those who had died during the war. The list included three hundred and forty-eight names, if I remember rightly. Perhaps some thirty of these names were those of soldiers who died during the Battles of the Scheldt and the Lys in 1940, all the others were victims of the Gestapo, or had died in camps in Germany, especially in the camps of Gross-Rosen and Neuengamme.”

  At Nuremberg the French Prosecution gave a list of figures, which was an anonymous roll of honor. The figures referred to the number of hostages taken from the civilian population and shot by the Germans in revenge for attacks on the occupation forces. And yet the list is not quite anonymous, because the figures break down into regions. And some of the many memorials scattered along the tourist roads of France commemorate the names behind these figures. Here they are, region by region:

  The total is twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and sixty. Notices of the executions would be put up on posters, or published in the Press. Here is one such notice taken from Le Phare of October 21st, 1941:

  NOTICE

  “Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and of Moscow killed, with shots in the back, the Feldkom-mandant of Nantes on the morning of October 20th, 1941. So far the assassins have not been apprehended.

  “As expiation for this crime I have ordered that fifty hostages be shot initially. Because of the gravity of the crime, fifty more hostages will be shot if the guilty have not been arrested between now and October 23rd midnight.”

  Most of the executed hostages in this case, as in many others, were known Communists, and they were chosen from a list furnished by the Vichy Minister of the Interior, Peucheu, who was to be tried and hanged by his countrymen after the war. What went on at these shootings is described by the Abbé Moyon, who was a witness of a part of the consequences of the Nantes affair:

  “It was a beautiful autumn day. The temperature was particularly mild. There had been lovely sunshine since morning. Everyone in town was going about his usual business. There was gre
at animation in the town, for it was Wednesday, which was market day. The population knew from the newspapers and from the information it had received from Nantes that a senior officer had been killed in a street in Nantes, but refused to believe that such savage and extensive reprisals would be applied [it was still only 1941]. At Choisel Camp the German authorities had, for some days, put into special quarters a certain number of young men who were to serve as hostages in case of special difficulties. It was from among these men that those who were to be shot on this evening of October 22nd were chosen.

  “The Curé of Béré was finishing his lunch when M. Moreau, Chief of Choisel Camp, presented himself. In a few words the latter explained to him the object of his visit. Having been delegated by M. Lecornu, the subprefect of Châteaubriant, he had come to inform him that twenty-seven men selected from among the political prisoners at Choisel were going to be executed that afternoon; and he asked Monsieur le Curé to go immediately to attend them. The priest said he was ready to undertake this mission, and he went to the prisoners without delay.