Hitler's Hangman (25 page)

tion of a permanent police state required a carefully elaborated scenario

portraying an all-pervasive and subtly camouflaged network of enemies

who made necessary an extensive and sophisticated security system to

detect, expose and defeat them. In 1935, in a series of articles for the SS

journal
Das Schwarze Korps
and republished in 1936 as
The Transformations

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of our Struggle
, Heydrich publicly defined such ‘threats’ and the means to

combat them, indicating the need for a momentous reorientation of the

Gestapo’s activities. His central argument was that even after the successful

elimination of the KPD and the SPD, the enemies of the German people

were by no means defeated. After achieving the ‘immediate goal’ of

Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933, many Germans

wrongly assumed that Nazi rule was now permanently secured. Heydrich

insisted that the battle was by no means over. Instead the struggle against

Germany’s enemies now faced its most difficult and ultimately its decisive

phase, which would require ‘years of bitter struggle in order to repulse and

destroy the enemy once and for all’.12

According to Heydrich, the ‘driving forces of the enemy always remain

the same: world Jewry, world Freemasonry’ and ‘political priests’, who

abused the freedom of religious expression and the spirituality of large

portions of the population for political purposes. These three arch-enemies

of Nazism worked towards the destruction of the Third Reich in myriad

‘camouflaged ways’, in which ‘so-called experts’ within the government

bureaucracy played a key role: they informed the political enemy of legal

initiatives against them and spread rumours designed to incite popular

outrage against the Hitler government. At the same time, they were

actively working to slow down or sabotage law-making processes and

their implementation. This expanded circle of enemies, Heydrich argued,

also included many university professors who allegedly indoctrinated

their students with liberal ideas. Heydrich’s accusations represented a

massive attack against the opponents of the SS within the German civil

service, who were declared almost en masse to be enemies of National

Socialism.13

Bolshevism, which had previously been regarded as Nazism’s greatest

opponent, was now portrayed by Heydrich as no more than a façade

behind which the real enemy lurked. The police alone, so he argued, had

little chance of defeating this illusive enemy without the help of the

SS – the ‘ideological shock troops’ of the Nazi movement.14 Germany’s

life-and-death struggle against internal and external enemies would be

conducted uncompromisingly and with harshness, ‘even if that means that

we will hurt individual opponents and even if some well-meaning people

will denounce us as undisciplined ruffians’.15 Heydrich never tired of

emphasizing the need for ‘utter hardness’ towards oneself and against

others, an attitude once again rooted in a vulgarized Darwinian under-

standing of life as an ‘eternal struggle between the stronger, more noble,

racially valuable people and the lower beings, the subhumans’. As in every

true struggle, there were only two possible outcomes: ‘Either we will over-

come the enemy once and for all, or we will perish.’16

F I G H T I N G T H E E N E M I E S O F T H E R E I C H

89

The toughness required to achieve victory over the enemies of Nazism,

so Heydrich insisted in a conversation with the Swiss Red Cross and

missionary, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, placed an enormous emotional burden

on him and his men, a sacrifice that was justified only by the greatness of

the course: ‘It is almost too difficult for an individual, but we must be hard

as granite, or else our Führer’s work will be in vain; much later people will

be grateful for what we have taken upon us.’ It was exactly the same argu-

ment, albeit under very different circumstances, that Heydrich and

Himmler would use during the Second World War in justifying the mass

murders by the SS task forces.17

Heydrich thus fundamentally reshaped and broadened the definition of

the enemies of Nazism. Both Bolshevism and Freemasonry were merely

‘expedient creations [
Zweckschöpfungen
] of Jewry’. That is why ‘ultimately

it is the Jew and the political cleric (which in its most distinctive form is

represented by the Jesuit) who form the basis of all oppositional groups’.

Such a far-reaching conception of the enemies of Nazism had conse-

quences for the organizations designed to combat them, namely

Heydrich’s SD and the political police. First of all, it required a rethinking

of the role of the political police in German society. Whereas in the

despised Weimar Republic, the police had been restrained by misguided

liberal notions of individual freedom, the police and the SS should be

freed of all fetters in order to ensure the protection of the German people

and their racial substance. In order to defeat an enemy lurking around

every corner, the work of the police could not be restricted by law. Legal

restrictions hampered the crucial success of the Gestapo’s work, as did

the alleged refusal of individual government authorities to co-operate.

Himmler and Heydrich would ultimately succeed in their demands. Until

1945, the legal basis for police measures remained the Reichstag Fire

Decree of 28 Feburary 1933, an emergency measure which had restricted

significant basic rights anchored in the Weimar Constitution, such as the

personal rights of prisoners, freedom of speech and the privacy of written

and oral communication. Throughout the Third Reich the German police

operated in a permanent state of emergency.18

Heydrich argued that the German police alone could not overcome the

heightened threat. Instead, it needed the support and expertise of the SS,

and notably that of the SD – the ideological avant-garde of the Nazi

movement – in order to win the conflict. Gradually, the ‘apolitical experts’

in policing matters would become redundant as a new generation of ideo-

logically committed SS men would take over their positions.19 In contrast

to traditional bureaucracy, high-ranking SS officers were not supposed

simply to administer; rather they were to lead and shape Germany’s

future. Time and again, Heydrich insisted that the traditional bureaucrat

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

in the civil service, focused on administrative procedures and titles, would

ultimately need to be replaced by a new cast of ‘political warriors’, ‘human

material’ selected exclusively on the basis of racial qualities, ideological

commitment and competence.20

Heydrich’s comments were not merely rhetorical. Throughout his career

in the SS, he was to maintain a keen interest in the recruitment process

for his own Security Police and SD empire, reserving his right to inter-

vene in appointment processes in order to ‘create a particularly suitable

leadership corps’. He was convinced that ‘the entire organization of

the Security Police will be ineffective if the people serving within it do

not ideologically, professionally and personally fulfil the standards which

this great task demands. This will be dependent on their racial and char-

acter selection, their age, their ideological and professional training, and

finally on the spirit with which these people are led to carry out all

their work.’21

In reality, of course, it was remarkable how little expertise individual

members of Heydrich’s staff required to act as ‘experts’ in certain policy

areas. His future ‘Jewish expert’, Adolf Eichmann, had been a salesman

with little previous administrative experience before joining the SD, and

the only job-specific qualification of the subsequent head of Heydrich’s

espionage section, Walter Schellenberg, was that he shared a passion for

crime fiction with his boss. Heydrich was certainly aware of the lack of

suitable personnel and actively sought to alleviate the problem. Designated

training centres such as the Leadership School of the Security Police and

the SD were set up in Berlin, designed to instruct the new officers in the

latest investigation and modern surveillance techniques, and to create,

through ideological education, what Heydrich called ‘the soldierly civil

servant’, who would be able to fulfil ‘the ideologically motivated tasks of

the state and criminal police’. Their training involved them in thinking

proactively about how to achieve their goals, with exam questions such as

‘compile a report for the entire Reich on Jews in the livestock trade and

propose your own remedies to the evil described’. Initiative and inde-

pendent problem-solving were qualities that Heydrich cherished.22 As

Himmler would later remark with approval, Heydrich ‘always stood by the

principle that only the best of our people, the racially most carefully

selected, with an excellent character and pure spirit, with a good heart and

gifted with an irrepressible hard will, were suitable to perform the service

of combating all that is negative . . . and to bear the hardships of this

responsibility’. For that reason, Himmler praised Heydrich as ‘one of

the best educators in Nazi Germany’.23

Over the following two years, Heydrich and his deputy as head of the

Security Police, Werner Best, in numerous articles that appeared in the

F I G H T I N G T H E E N E M I E S O F T H E R E I C H

91

Völkischer Beobachter
and the journal
Deutsches Recht
, further developed

the notion that the traditional police could no longer master the Reich’s

enemies. Political enemies had to be pursued preventively. In an article

published in 1937, Heydrich wrote: ‘The overall task of the Security Police

is to protect the German people as a total being [
Gesamtwesen
], their vital

force and their institutions, against any kind of destruction and corrosion.

Defensively, it must resist attacks by all forces that could in any way

weaken and destroy the health, vital force and ability to act of the people

and of the state . . . Offensively, it must probe and then combat all enemy

elements in order to assure that they cannot become destructive and

corrosive in the first place.’ Heydrich’s understanding of the tasks of the

Security Police in the Third Reich was now more comprehensive than

ever: it was responsible for the struggle against ‘subhumans’, Jews,

Freemasons, Churches and other ‘criminals’ – indeed against ‘disorder’ in

general.24 The Gestapo, the SD and the general SS should further be

merged into a state protection corps, a sort of ‘internal Wehrmacht’, in

order to place the combating and pursuit of ideological enemies on a new

and more solid foundation.25 Ever since the Nazi revolution, Heydrich

wrote, the German police had been given an entirely new task: the preven-

tive protection of ‘the people and the state’ against all enemies in ‘all areas

of life’. The SD was to play a key role in this process as the think-tank of

enemy persecution in the Third Reich.26

In the summer of 1937, Heydrich decided that it was time to disen-

tangle the overlapping responsibilities of his two agencies, the SD and the

Security Police, in an attempt to realize his aim of creating a unified state

protection corps. The future division of labour between the two agencies

was, at least in theory, quite simple: from 1 July 1937 onwards, the SD was

to take charge of all important (and largely theoretical) questions of state

security, while the Gestapo was to act as its executive arm, responsible for

the persecution of political crimes.27 The task of the SD, Heydrich

insisted, was not only to analyse political crimes retrospectively, but to

prevent their repetition in the future.28 The growing importance attributed

to the SD by Heydrich was reflected in its increasing size: between 1935

and 1940 alone, the number of full-time SD employees rose from 1,100

to 4,300.29

Heydrich’s conception of the struggle against political opponents and

internal enemies in the mid-1930s thus rested on four central convictions.

First, the struggle against Jews, Freemasons and ‘politicizing priests’ had to

be undertaken in a comprehensive and preventive manner in order to

achieve success. Second, the work of the political police should not be

made subject to any legal restrictions. Third, the Gestapo and the SD

should be combined into a state protection corps. Fourth, unyielding

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toughness and ruthlessness were essential to secure the German state and