Himmler, too, was the beneficiary of a Nazi apparatus unfettered with the likes of an Ernst Röhm. The flow of SA blood paved the way for the emergence of the more military SS as an independent organization charged with safeguarding the embodiment of the National Socialist idea and translating the racism of the regime into a dynamic principle of action. The Reichsführer occupied a splendid villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Dahlem alongside other high Party officials, as well as a country home on the Tegernsee. However, neither location was suitable for the seat of his rising SS Order. His wandering eye fell upon Wewelsburg Castle, an impressive triple-towered renaissance-era citadel overlooking the Alme Valley ten miles southwest of Paderborn. The location and unusual triangular form of the castle, which had served as the secondary residence of the prince bishops of Paderborn in the early 1600s, was perfect for what Himmler had in mind. He viewed his black-shirted SS men as the reincarnation of not just the medieval order of the Teutonic knights, but also of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. Arthur had Camelot; Himmler would have Wewelsburg.
The SS rented the castle in 1934 from the district of Büren for a single Reichsmark each year. Himmler intended to transform the castle into a nucleus of support for the pseudo-scientific ideology of National Socialism and a sacred shrine for dead SS leaders. Improvement work on the Wewelsburg complex began immediately. The castle’s focal point, a grand dining hall complete with a gigantic oak table that seated twelve, owed much to Arthurian legend. Coats of arms adorned the walls. Below the dining hall was a circular cellar called the “Ring of Honor.” The room, intended as a crypt, was lighted by a few rectangular openings in the thick brick walls and sported a giant swastika embedded in the ceiling. Signet rings emblazoned with the horrendous “death’s head” insignia were presented to the first 10,000 SS men and to senior commanders. Whenever an SS notable died, his ring was placed in a chest housed in the crypt. Select SS members were ordained into senior positions there.
Each of the rooms allotted to the knights in the castle commemorated Germanic heroes, decorated and furnished in period and provided with books and documents on their subject. Himmler’s castle quarters were dedicated to Heinrich I, the tenth-century Saxon King who beat back Magyar horsemen pressing westward from the interior of Russia and formed the basis of the German confederation of princes which became, under his son Otto, the Holy Roman Empire.5
Reichsführer Himmler had successfully completed his bid to win control of the political and criminal police throughout the Third Reich when he became head of the Gestapo that had originally been established by Göring. Almost every level of power was now either under Himmler’s command or within reach of his iron cold grasp. Now the only question was how that power would be wielded and the results that would flow from its use.
Chapter 2
“We have achieved a complete victory and the SS is in formation and awaiting further orders.”
— Ernst Kaltenbrunner to Heinrich Himmer, March 12, 1938
Hitler’s Rogues: Reinhard Heydrich and Ernst Kaltenbrunner
In order to channel his authority and project his power into every nook and cranny of the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler created the Reich Security Main Office, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA). The idea had been in the works for some time, but was finally formalized with a decree on September 27, 1939, merging the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and the Secret State Police (Gestapo) into one policing authority under the control of a single organization. With the stroke of a pen Himmler consolidated his own power base and simultaneously created an organization capable of carrying out murder, deportations, and intelligence activities on a grand scale.
It proved a deft political stratagem.
The Reich Security Main Office was headed by Reinhard Tristan Heydrich, one of the leading architects of the “Final Solution.” Heydrich was born in Halle, a provincial town in Prussia, on March 7, 1904. His father was a Dresden music teacher and the founder of the First Halle Conservatory for Music, Theatre, and Teaching. Born too late to participate in WWI but craving a military career, Heydrich enlisted at Kiel in the much-reduced German navy in March of 1922. Service as a tar under Wilhelm Canaris generated a taste for intelligence work, but his naval career foundered in 1931. Heydrich was forced to resign for conduct unbecoming an officer after compromising the virtue of a shipyard director’s daughter.1
Long-fascinated with racial ideologies and right wing politics, the out-of-work and disaffected Prussian seized the opportunity and joined the Nazi party and SS that same year. Tall, slim, blond-haired with a set of deep blue eyes, Heydrich with his military bearing, iron discipline, and icy hardness epitomized the Hitler-inspired Aryan Nazi mythology. Himmler had found the perfect right-hand man. He immediately took Heydrich under his protective wing and groomed him for special work. The result was a meteoric rise through the ranks. By Christmas Day he was a major. He established the intelligence department of the SS, the Sicherheitsdenst, or SD, in 1932. As Himmler’s assistant, Heydrich spent much of 1933 and 1934 overseeing the unification of the political police. In 1934 he took control of the Prussian Gestapo in Berlin. Before summer’s end, the 28-year-old was an SS Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General), a reward for his murderously efficient services rendered during the liquidation of Ernst Röhm and his cronies. Two years later, in 1936, he was made chief of the newly formed Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei), or SIPO. The organization was part of the ministry of the interior, which meant Heydrich now had complete control over the Gestapo and the criminal police for the entire country. Himmler’s able technician of power politics was indispensable to the rising masters of the Third Reich.
Heydrich’s arrogant facade disguised a deep inferiority complex and pathological self-hatred that found an outlet in his morbid suspiciousness and boundless greed for power. Indeed, Heydrich suffered from a gnawing uncertainty as to his own racial origins. Some (including Heydrich) suspected he was part Jewish. Although his rivals were never able to establish a Jewish connection as a matter of fact, it added to Heydrich’s innate sense of inferiority and aggravated his tendency to see treachery, intrigue, and potential hostility lurking around every corner.2
As head of the SIPO (Himmler’s unified, centralized, and militarized security police), Heydrich acted with pitiless harshness in his dealings with those declared to be enemies of the state. His cynicism and contempt for human beings helped him spin a gigantic and intricate web of police surveillance throughout the Third Reich. Extensive dossiers were filed not only on enemies of the Nazi Party but on his rivals and colleagues. The police apparatus was utilized to pit his opponents against one another. Anyone who stood in the way of his duties or the goals of the State were arrested, tortured, and murdered—especially Marxists, Jews, Freemasons, Liberal Republicans, and religious figures.
Heydrich’s expertise at political dirty tricks, scandalous intrigue and blackmail zeroed in on other convenient targets. Seeking a means of solidifying his control of the Germany army, Hitler unleashed his henchmen against two prominent commanders, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg and Brigadeführer (General) Baron Werner von Fritsch. Trumped up charges and “proof” of homosexuality against the latter, coupled with a marriage scandal involving the former’s wife, ousted both from power in 1938. Heydrich also masterminded the fake attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, which was used as a pretext for Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.3
The same month of the Polish invasion, which triggered WWII in Europe, Heydrich was tapped to command the Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA. The Prussian lieutenant general and Aryan poster boy now had absolute control of the entire secret police organization. This power was used for murderous purposes. In a directive dealing with the “Jewish question” issued on September 21, 1939, Heydrich distinguished between the “final aim, requiring longer periods of time” (and necessarily top secret) and the stages required for achieving it. Heydrich set about implementing the preliminary steps necessary to achieve
the “Final Solution.” After the conquest of Poland, he ordered Polish Jewsconcentrated into ghettoes and authorized the appointment of Jewish councils, a characteristically perfidious way of forcing Jewish communities to collaborate in their own destruction. Hundreds of thousands were stripped of all their worldly wealth. With the assistance of SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann and other SS members, Heydrich began mass deportations of Jews and other undesirables from Austria and Germany into Poland.
On July 31, 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, commissioned Heydrich to find “a total solution to the Jewish question.” Heydrich, in other words, was delegated to take responsibility for all the necessary organizational and administrative measures necessary to implement the destruction of European Jewry. Death camps were organized for this purpose (later called Operation Reinhard in his honor). Einsatzgruppen squads, or mobile killing units, were organized to follow in the wakes of the various victorious German armies. The sole purpose of these small squads was to round up and execute Jews, intellectuals, Soviet commissars and partisans, prisoners of war, and other undesirables. This enormous mass killing spree, carried out with the cooperation of many high-ranking Wehrmacht officers (who often did not approve but turned a blind eye to the murders nonetheless), took the lives of almost 1,000,000 people.4
The head of RSHA left his Berlin headquarters to assume the post of Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Monrovia on September 23, 1941. Residence was taken up in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he adopted what has been called “the policy of the whip and the sugar.” Hitler wanted the Czechs mobilized into a slave labor base. Repression, arrests, torture, and executions were carried out at the same time he designed to win over workers and peasants by improving their social conditions. On January 20, 1942, Heydrich organized a top secret conference in the Berlin suburb of Grossen-Wannsee. The purpose of the meeting was to organize the various government agencies and streamline the process of implementing the “Final Solution.” Although many high-ranking Party officials (like Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Joachim von Ribbentrop) were conspicuously absent, in attendance were fourteen of the Third Reich’s leading second-tier figures, including Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. In a speech rich in euphemisms but clearly understood by all in attendance, Heydrich methodically discussed the organized mass murder of Jews.5
The Czech government, operating in exile in England, was about to take matters in its own hands. A pair of specially trained men, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, parachuted into Czechoslovakia on December 28, 1941. Partisans sympathetic to their cause guided the assassins to a country home in the village of Panenske Brezany. Heydrich had stolen the estate from its Jewish owner and placed his own family within its walls. Kubis and Gabcik figured out Heydrich’s routine and somehow obtained a copy of his travel plans for May 27, 1942. Heydrich, they learned, was slated to meet Hitler in Berlin. In order to get there, however, he had to drive on a stretch of road that required him to slow down for a sharp turn. It was the perfect place for an assassination. At about 10:30 in the morning on May 27, “the Butcher of Prague” was in his car and slowing down for the turn when Gabcik jumped up and pulled the trigger on his pistol. It misfired. A shocked Heydrich drew his own pistol and fired at the Czech, while Kubis lobbed a grenade into the open car. The badly wounded general chased away his attackers with gun in hand before collapsing on the ground with damage to his lungs, spleen, and diaphragm. He lingered in agony for a week before dying on June 8, perhaps as a result of blood poisoning from the horse hair seat stuffing that had been embedded in his body. It was the only successful assassination of a major Nazi leader during the entire Second World War. The devil was eulogized at his funeral by Hitler, Himmler, and his old rival, Admiral Canaris.6
The reprisal for his death was swift and brutal, and ordered by the Führer himself. The assassins had supposedly been tied to a small village near Prague called Lidice. The Germans razed the entire town and executed most of its male inhabitants. Two hundred women and half as many children were shipped to concentration camps. Another Czech village, Lazaky, suffered a similar fate. Nearly 1,000 additional Czechs were condemned to death by a German court-martial in Prague. A “special action” in Berlin resulted in the death of another 152 Jews and more than 3,000 were deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto and eventually exterminated. In death, as in life, Heydrich’s name was inextricably linked with terror and intimidation. But his passing did not derail or even slow down the German death machine. His replacement proved just as fanatical and soulless.7
Ernst Kaltenbrunner was born on October 4, 1903, in the valley of the Inn, near Braunau, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. He was educated in Linz; Adolf Eichmann was one of his boyhood friends. Kaltenbrunner studied law at Graz University, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, both of whom were lawyers. He took his doctorate in law in 1926 and set up a practice in Linz. He was an unattractive giant of a man, tall with massive broad shoulders, huge arms, a thick square chin, and deep scars on his face from his student dueling days. Few would have guessed that twenty years later he would be dancing at the end of a rope as one of the world’s most notorious war criminals.8
Active in one of the first groups of Austrian National Socialist students and, for a time, as a militant in the Independent movement for a Free Austria, Kaltenbrunner eventually joined the Nazi Party in 1930. By 1933 he was a member of the well-camouflaged Austrian SS, an organization forbidden in Austria at that time. He was arrested by the Dollfuss government in 1934 and again in May 1935. The bill for bad behavior was steep: six months in a prison cell on a conspiracy charge and the loss of his license to practice law because of his radical political activities. By 1937, however, things were looking up for the disfigured and disbarred Austrian colossus: Kaltenbrunner had risen to command the Austrian SS. The Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany, worked to Kaltenbrunner’s advantage when he was given control over the SS and police for Vienna and the Upper and Lower Danube. By April 1941 he was also the lieutenant general of Police. Like Reinhard Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner created an impressive intelligence network. His efforts caught the attention of Himmler, who to the surprise of many, recommended in January 1943 that Kaltenbrunner head the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin.9
The result of this consolidation of power under the RSHA umbrella was organized and focused terror on a widespread scale. Kaltenbrunner had complete control of a substantial segment of the most powerful parts of the Nazi apparatus, including the Gestapo and the methods of extermination. And he enjoyed his work. Kaltenbrunner took a personal interest in the wide variety of methods employed to snuff out human lives, both individually and en masse. The use of gas chambers especially fascinated him. Under his relentless direction, his RSHA men hunted down and exterminated several million Jews. His resume also boasts responsibility for murdering Allied parachutists and prisoners of war.
In order to understand how the Reich Security Main Office operated, it is imperative to appreciate its complex internal structure. The RSHA consisted of seven bureaus numbered I through VII. For administrative purposes, each bureau was subdivided into groups and subsections. The whole was staffed by some 100,000 men. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr, which was responsible for all military intelligence and counter-intelligence, was absorbed into Bureau VI in February 1944.10
The Bureaus of intelligence and death overseen by Kaltenbrunner were organized and staffed as follows:
Bureau I: Personnel and Organization under the command of SS Standartenführer (Colonel) Erich Ehrlinger.
This section managed to gain a position of prominence rarely seen in a personnel section of any agency. Almost all the chiefs of the sections of the bureau maintained their positions due to political clout. Bureau I and its members were unpopular with the rest of the RSHA bureaus, but there was little love lost between any of the sections housed within RSHA
, where intense rivalries and political intrigue thrived.
Colonel Erich Ehrlinger, born October 10, 1914, was plucked from his successful tenure as a commander with the Einsatzgruppen (or mobile killing squads) to head Bureau I. His eyes had overseen mass murder on an almost unprecedented scale while serving on the Russian front from 1941 through 1943. During the early months of the RSHA’s existence, Bureau I acquired an incredible measure of power. The bureau’s function was the appointment of personnel requested by the other bureaus. The transferees were initially assigned to a Waffen-SS division, and then sent to Bureau I headquarters for reassignment to other RSHA Bureaus.
Bureau I’s primary claim to infamy was its creation of special units initially drawn from the SIPO (Security Police) and SD (Secret Police and Secret Service of the SS). The Einsatzgruppen, or as one author calls them, “itinerant killing institutions,” were organized for specialized looting and murder instead of traditional warfare. Generally speaking, these insidious units operated in the wake of the advancing Wehrmacht armies. After entering a town or region, Jews and other undesirables were assembled and transported into the countryside, where they were shot to death, either individually or en masse. Although they managed to exterminate over 1,000,000 Russian Jews, gypsies, communist party leaders, and others deemed unworthy, no more than about 3,000 men at the outset served in the Einsatzgruppen; perhaps 6,000, all told, stood in its ranks before the war ended. Even in the midst of this ghastly business the RSHA managed to ring up a profit by combing through the stiff corpses for valuables and organizing the stolen property of those rounded up to die.11
Nazi Millionaires Page 4