Heinrich Himmler

present.

Roehm, meanwhile, was taking an arbitrary line with the S.S. in Berlin, which under Daluege still managed to remain independent of Himmler in Munich. Roehm appointed his own director of training for the S.S. in his area, Friedrich Krueger, but on public occasions Roehm and Himmler appeared together in apparent harmony. Himmler was in no position to press openly for power; he was forced to play the part of the subordinate, while at the same time he studied the opportunities which the work of Heydrich and his S.D. agents were so diligently compiling. He was well satisfied with the rapid growth of the S.S. directly under his control, and with the carefully planned organization and training which had been achieved.

^{Himmler’s father, Gebhard Himmler}

^{Himmler as a schoolboy in Munich (second row from the front, second from the right)}

A description of the S.S. formations during the period 1933-4 was given before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg by von Eberstein, the man who had introduced Heydrich to Himmler; Eberstein was an ex- officer and civil servant who had joined the S.S. in 1928 and was typical of its aristocratic leanings. ‘Before 1933’, he said at Nuremberg, ‘a great number of aristocrats and members of German princely houses joined the S.S.’¹² He mentioned, for example, the Prince von Waldeck, and the Prince von Mecklenburg, and after 1932, the Prince Lippe-Biesterfeld, General Graf von Schulenburg, Archbishop Groeber of Freiburg, the Archbishop of Brunswick and the Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. When Himmler took over in 1929, there had been, according to Eberstein, only about fifty S.S. men in the district of Thuringia, where he was acting for the S.S. in Weimar, but after the seizure of power he had charge of some 15,000 S.S. men in the area covering Saxony and Thuringia. The elegant S.S. uniform attracted recruits and added to their social prestige. As Eberstein said at Nuremberg:

‘The increase can be explained first by the fact that the National Socialist government had come to power, and a large number of people wanted to show their loyalty to the new State. Secondly, after the Party in May 1933 ordered that no more members should be taken, many wanted to become members of the semi-military formations such as the S.S. and S.A., and through them to become members of the Party later. But then again there were also others who sought the pleasures of sport and the comradeship of young men and were less politically interested… From about February or March 1934, Himmler ordered an investigation of all those S.S. members who had joined in 1933, a thorough reinvestigation which lasted until 1935, and at that time about fifty to sixty thousand members throughout the entire Reich were released from the S.S…. The selection standards required a certificate of good conduct from the police. It was required that people be able to prove that they led a decent life and performed their duty in their profession. No unemployed persons or people who were unwilling to work were accepted.’

For Heydrich, the S.S. already represented the nucleus of a secret police once the Party came to power. As Reitlinger has pointed out, an official political police already existed in both Berlin and Munich, and when the great police purge came after 30 January many men in this secret service remained to serve the Nazis; among them for example was Heinrich Mueller, who later became head of the Gestapo before he had in fact become a Party member. Affidavits read at the Nuremberg Trial make it clear that the S.D. was well prepared with its screenings of the members of the Political Police in Munich, which was known as Department VI of the Police Organization. Most of them were immediately absorbed into the service of Himmler when he was appointed President of Police in Munich by Hitler, a very minor office compared with that given to Goring who, in addition to his Cabinet rank and Presidency of the Reichstag, became also Minister of the Interior for the state of Prussia. This appointment gave Goring charge of the police in what was by far the largest and most influential state administration in Germany. Goring immediately used his authority to place the Berlin S.S. leader, Kurt Daluege, at the head of the Prussian police, and appointed Rudolf Diels, a police official married to his cousin, Ilse Goring, as head of the section of political police that he created, the Berlin Police Bureau 1A, which was later to be renamed the Gestapo. Daluege at this stage was wholly under the influence of Goring and refused even to receive Heydrich, who went to Berlin to see him on Himmler’s behalf on 15 March. Daluege, young, bland and opportunist without either intelligence or conscience, had reached the rank of an S.S. general by the age of twenty-nine. Before joining the S.S., he had been in charge of refuse disposal for the City Engineer. Now he had to use his wits to steer his way through the conflicting currents of his superiors’ struggle for power.¹³

In the months immediately following Hitler’s Chancellorship, it was Goring, not Himmler, who was the principal activator of police control. He poured his prodigious energy into the defeat of the remnants of democracy in Germany and into the rout of the Communists, the Party’s chosen enemy in the Reichstag and in the streets. Speed was what mattered, and the use of violence and terror to break up the forces of resistance before they could realize what was happening and oppose this sudden, savage onslaught by rallying themselves to out-vote Hitler in the elections due on 5 March. Within a week the Prussian Parliament was dissolved; within a month unreliable police chiefs and civil servants alike were dismissed and replaced, and the police, both new and old, were armed; ‘a bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet’, cried Goring. To stop disorders, either real or imagined, Goring commandeered 25,000 men from the S.A. and 10,000 from the S.S. and armed them to supplement the activities of the police; the Communist leaders were arrested and their party virtually put out of action before the elections could be fought. In February, the night of the Reichstag fire, both Hitler and Goring declared that a Communist putsch had been imminent and that the fire was a beacon from heaven with which to blaze the trail of the Communist traitors. On 28 February the clauses of the constitution guaranteeing civil liberties were suspended, and anyone could be placed without trial under ‘protective custody’. At the polls the Nazis secured only a bare majority along with their allies the Nationalists, but with the Reichstag stripped of its Communist deputies Hitler was able to put through an Enabling Bill on 23 March which gave him power to govern by means of emergency decrees.

Action of this order was scarcely in Himmler’s nature. When it was decided that the Catholic Conservative government in Munich should be removed, it was the S.A. under the Ritter von Epp, the friend of Roehm, who dismissed them on 8 March. Himmler, the Bavarian President of Police, was by-passed. In the same month, Goring set up his first concentration camps in Prussia under the supervision of Diels, and in April segregated his political police in their own headquarters in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. In January they became known officially as the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Secret State Police, or Gestapo for short. This was a first significant move towards centralization in the police control of the state, and it was a warning to Himmler, whose autonomy still lay only in Bavaria.

Between April 1933 and April of the following year, Himmler took his own devious but independent line of action. Heydrich had become head of the Bavarian secret police and of the S.S. Security Office. Himmler established his own model concentration camp at Dachau, parallel with those created by Goring and others which were set up elsewhere, both semi-officially and unofficially by the S.S., the S.A. and the Nazi Gauleiters, who had been hurried into office in the various Gaue, or regions, into which Germany was divided for Nazi administration. At Nuremberg Goring claimed that he closed those unauthorized camps that came to his notice and where, he gathered, brutalities were practised. A camp founded by the S.S. near Osnabruck led to active friction between Himmler and Goring, whose investigators, led by Diels, claimed they were fired upon by the S.S. guards when they were sent to find out what was happening. Himmler was forced to close the camp on direct orders from Hitler. Goring’s intervention was largely dictated by his desire at this time to become the co-ordinator of police activities throughout Germany. That he failed was due to the persistent ambition of Himmler to improve his personal position and the desire of Roehm to merge the large forces of the S.A. into those of the regular army with himself as Supreme Commander, a situation which neither Goring nor Hitler would tolerate.

To control his camp at Dachau, Himmler established a volunteer formation of S.S. men willing to undertake long-term service as camp guards. This central formation was called the Death’s Head (Totenkopf) unit and granted the special insignia of the skull and crossbones; the officer put in command of this and other Death’s Head units was Theodor Eicke, a former Army officer and veteran of the First World War, who was one of Himmler’s most trusted adherents on racial matters. One of Eicke’s guards at Dachau was an Austrian, Adolf Eichmann; another in 1934 was Rudolf Hoess, later to take charge of extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz.