Hitler's Hangman (20 page)

envoy from Munich who was also his junior in SS rank. Daluege never

answered Heydrich’s phone calls, and on 5 March a frustrated Heydrich

wrote to complain that he had been unsuccessful in penetrating Daluege’s

‘protective screen’ of receptionists.58

That same evening, Heydrich returned to Munich, where – one month

after Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor – the Nazi takeover was

finally within reach. Ironically, Bavaria, the second largest German state

and the original birthplace of Nazism, was the last of the
Länder
to come

under Nazi control. On 9 March, one of the most prominent Nazi politi-

cians in Bavaria, Franz Ritter von Epp, was installed in Munich as new

state commissioner. The takeover was secured after Heydrich and a group

of SS men threatened postal workers loyal to the hitherto ruling Bavarian

People’s Party with violence to ensure the delivery of the telegram

announcing Hitler’s appointment of Epp.59 Epp, in turn, appointed

Himmler as acting police president of Munich, and shortly thereafter, on

1 April, the Reich Leader SS assumed control over the entire Bavarian

Political Police and the auxiliary police formations composed of SA and

SS men. The Bavarian Political Police, which during the Weimar Republic

had served to combat extremists of the radical left and right, was handed

to the twenty-nine-year-old Heydrich, who quickly used his newly gained

powers to transform the department into an efficient instrument of terror

against real and perceived enemies of the Nazi revolution.60

Heydrich pursued his new task with determination, delighted that the

frustrations of the previous months were finally overcome. Lina’s letter to

her parents of 13 March reflects some of that enthusiasm, as well as the

66

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Heydrichs’ surprise at how suddenly Reinhard had been thrust into a

position of power:

What a life! You will certainly have read about our little revolution in

the newspapers. According to Reinhard’s anecdotes, it must have been

delightful. Let me tell you how I experienced it: on Wednesday Reinhard

came home early and announced that he had to go back immediately to

the Brown House, since the Bavarian government refused to submit . . .

At eleven o’clock he rang me to say that I should send his pistol to the

Brown House. I naturally feared the worst and got quite a shock. At 1

o’clock the government instructed the Bavarian police that they were to

shoot at the SA immediately if they attempted to topple the Bavarian

government on the orders of the Reich Chancellor. Then Röhm,

Himmler, and Reinhard drove to Minister President [Heinrich] Held

and negotiated with him for a whole hour . . . Reinhard said he felt great

satisfaction that the same people who had been locking up the SA and

the SS just half a year ago, who beat them down with rubber truncheons,

could now no longer straighten their backs for all the bowing they did.

Himmler will become the police president . . . and Reinhard – please

don’t laugh now – will become commissioner of the political police. I

had to laugh so hard . . . In the evening SA and SS enjoyed themselves.

They were entrusted with arresting all known political enemies and had

to bring them to the Brown House. That was something for the lads.

They could finally take revenge for all the injustice done to them, for all

the blows and injuries, and avenge their fallen comrades. Over 200 are

now locked up, from the KPD, SPD, the Bavarian People’s Party and

Jews . . . There, in the reception hall [of the Brown House], the Interior

Minister stood in his socks and nightshirt, surrounded by a group of SA

and SS men who couldn’t stop laughing. Then they came with their big

shoes and stepped on the crying Interior Minister’s toes, so that he

jumped from one leg to the other between them. You can imagine the

scene.

Lina then described how a prominent member of Munich’s Jewish

community was dragged into the Brown House by a group of SS men:

They made short work of him [
machten kurzen Prozess mit ihm
]. They

beat him with dog whips, pulled off his shoes and socks, and then he had

to walk home barefoot in the company of SS men . . . That will give you

an idea of how they do things. Many Jesuits and Jews have fled from

here. No one is dead, no one has been seriously injured, but fear, fear, I

tell you.61

B E C O M I N G H E Y D R I C H

67

The reality was even grimmer than Lina’s account suggested. Under the

aegis of Himmler and Heydrich, the scale of arrests in Bavaria was propor-

tionately higher even than in Prussia. Immediately after 9 March, a first

wave of arrests rounded up real and imagined enemies of the Nazi regime,

most notably Communists, Social Democrats and trade union officials –

some 10,000 of them by April.62 Jews also featured prominently among

those arrested. Protests against the often arbitrary arrests were met with

violence, as the lawyer Michael Siegel experienced when on 10 March, one

day after Heydrich’s appointment as head of the Bavarian Political Police,

he lodged a complaint against the arrest of one of his Jewish clients with

the Munich police. Siegel was badly beaten by SS auxiliary policemen and

force-marched through the streets of the city, a placard bound around his

neck: ‘I wil never again complain about the police.’63

In an attempt to transform the Bavarian Political Police into an effec-

tive instrument of repression, Heydrich quickly recruited some 152 men

from various levels of the Munich Metropolitan Police. Some of them

were members of the Nazi Party, but most were not. Several of the new

recruits would share Heydrich’s professional path until the very end, most

importantly perhaps the thirty-three-year-old Heinrich Müller who

would become head of Heydrich’s Gestapo in 1939, a position he held

until the very end of the Second World War. Müller was born in Munich

in 1900, the son of a minor Catholic police official. He participated in the

First World War as a volunteer from 1917 onwards and earned various

decorations for bravery as a pilot. After the war, he entered the Munich

Metropolitan Police in which, thanks to his great energy, he rose quickly.

He was involved in the political police department, where he specialized

in combating the extreme left. When Heydrich took over the Munich

Metropolitan Police building on 9 March 1933, Müller was among those

who offered resistance. However, rather than dismissing him from office,

Heydrich decided to take advantage of his knowledge of international

Communism and policing matters, despite the negative political evalua-

tion Müller had received from the Munich Gauleitung for being loyal to

the long-ruling Bavarian People’s Party. The retention of non-party

members such as Müller in the services of the new state police was in no

way atypical. In 1933–4, the political police agencies in most German

states were only sporadically restaffed with Nazi Party members.64 Since

Heydrich was not an expert in policing matters, he had little choice but to

rely on the professional competence and experience of men like Müller.

While he publicly described apolitical experts as ultimately expendable, in

practice he could not do without them.65

As part of his reconstruction of the Bavarian Political Police into an

ideological y reliable and efficient tool of repression, Heydrich made

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

extensive use of a new instrument of terror known as protective custody –

the potential y open-ended and judicial y unsupervised internment of

persons in newly established concentration camps, where real or al eged

enemies of the new regime were subjected to arbitrary and unrestrained

terror.66 Already in mid-March, an abandoned munitions factory in

Dachau, a smal town sixteen kilometres north-west of Munich, had been

converted into what was going to become one of the most notorious early

concentration camps for prisoners in protective custody.67 The day after

Heydrich was instal ed as head of the Bavarian Political Police, control

over Dachau (previously in the hands of the ordinary police) was trans-

ferred to the SS, which immediately unleashed an orgy of violence. Many

prisoners died as a result of maltreatment and random shootings. The

dreaded name Dachau soon became a powerful deterrent, a byword for the

horrifying though largely unspoken events known or presumed to have

taken place within the camp wal s.68

The number of camp inmates at Dachau grew rapidly, from 170 in

March to 2,033 in May 1933, as Heydrich gleeful y reported in two letters

to the Bavarian Interior Minister. By 1 August that year, some 4,152

political opponents from Bavaria were being held in protective custody,

more than 2,200 of them in Dachau. By January 1934, a total of 16,409

had been arrested, of whom 12,554 were released again, usual y after severe

beatings coupled with warnings never to become political y active again.69

Brutal maltreatment of the prisoners in protective custody in Dachau was

the norm. Between mid-April and late May 1933 alone, thirteen camp

inmates died as a result of injuries received during their captivity.70

In all of this, Heydrich’s actions cannot simply be understood as those

of a bloodthirsty sadist playing a preconceived role in building a totali-

tarian police state. Since joining the SS in 1931, he had immersed himself

in a political milieu which thrived on the notion of being locked in a life-

and-death struggle. Winning that struggle required decisive action against

enemies in respect of whom even the most unimaginable cruelty was justi-

fied. As his future deputy, Werner Best, observed, Heydrich tended to

project his own proclivity towards intrigues and violence on to his real or

alleged enemies. Finally free to move against an ideological enemy who

had supposedly enjoyed the upper hand until 1933, he considered terror a

justifiable weapon – in fact, the only adequate weapon against such evil.71

That Heydrich was put in charge of the imprisonment and release of

political enemies but not of the Dachau camp itself was characteristic

both of the divisions of labour within Nazi Germany in general and of

Himmler’s leadership style more specifically. The Dachau camp comman-

dant was Theodor Eicke, born in 1892 and dismissed from the army after

a brief military career in 1919. Eicke, a party member since 1928, had

B E C O M I N G H E Y D R I C H

69

been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment during the Weimar Republic

for the illegal possession of explosives and had spent the first months of

1933 in a psychiatric asylum. As in Heydrich’s case, Himmler offered

Eicke a second chance and he would not disappoint his new boss.72

Within months, Eicke, who would become inspector of all concentra-

tion camps in 1934, created a new form of camp regime that differed

profoundly from other early concentration camps of the Third Reich. The

key features of the so-called Dachau system, which would subsequently

provide the model for the camps of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and

Ravensbrück, included the total isolation of the inmates from the outside

world, involving above all the prevention of escapes at any cost to limit the

emergence of ‘enemy propaganda’; labour duties for all prisoners in order

to make the system economically viable; a systemization of the previously

arbitrary violence through the introduction of a penal and punishment

code; and stricter supervision of the guards, who were now issued with

special regulations. The desired public impression, namely that the arbi-

trary SA violence had now been replaced by a camp regime that was strict

but based on certain rules, was also a component of this system. In reality,

of course, conditions in the camp were horrifying and the violence against

inmates continued to be purely arbitrary.73

Indeed, violent excesses occurred on such a scale that Heydrich felt the

need to remind his staff in September 1934 that uncontrolled abuse of

internees in protective custody would no longer be tolerated, emphasizing

that ‘it is unworthy’ of an SS man ‘to insult or to handle internees with

unnecessary roughness. The arrestee is to be treated with the necessary

severity, but never with chicanery or unnecessary persecution. I will pros-

ecute severely, with the utmost rigour, offences against this order.’74 What

drove Heydrich’s order was not compassion for the inmates, but a desire

for stricter discipline and concern about the SS’s public image. He wanted

the Nazi political police to be dreaded by its enemies for its efficiency and

thoroughness, but he also wanted the ‘good citizen’ to know that there was

no need to fear his organization. The outside perception mattered far more