Hitler's Hangman (42 page)

ical statements about the regime. In such cases, where offences were a

singular event, a personal warning or other form of ‘intimidation’ would be

sufficient to reintegrate the offender into the people’s community or

Volksgemeinschaft
. At the same time, the person in question was to be left

in no doubt that he or she could expect worse if found repeating such

behaviour. Repeat offenders, habitual criminals and persons acting out of

ideological conviction should not expect mercy. Local police commanders

were ordered to bring these cases to Heydrich’s immediate attention so

that he could personally order their ‘brutal liquidation’ if necessary.82

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

163

The institution created by Heydrich in order to co-ordinate terror on

the home front and in the occupied territories over the years to come was

the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), formally established on 27

September after many months of preparation. This was brought about by

combining the Sipo (the Gestapo and criminal police) with the SD. The

RSHA constituted a new type of institution: a merger between the polit-

ical police, a traditional organ of state repression that had already existed

during the Weimar Republic, and a newer party agency of persecution, the

SD. In contrast to a conventional police apparatus, the purpose of the

RSHA was not merely to persecute criminals, but also preventively to

cleanse state and society of political and racial enemies, and thus to act as

a key tool for the creation of a utopian New Order.83

The creation of the RSHA was largely motivated by two considerations

that had ripened in Heydrich’s and Himmler’s minds over the preceding

years: first it would bring the SS one step closer to the establishment of a

fully integrated terror agency, a state protection corps, comprising the

Gestapo, the criminal police and the SD. Secondly, the creation of a new

state agency would resolve the old problem of financing the ever-growing

SD. Since 1931 the Nazi Party’s treasury had paid its salaries and running

costs only erratically. Heydrich was fully aware that independence from

party funding meant independence from party intervention, and therefore

increased power. By including the SD in the new RSHA, he hoped to

finance the SD from exchequer resources, thereby making it possible to

expand the scale of its operations and rendering it less dependent on the

Nazi Party’s administration.84

The official launch of the RSHA in the autumn of 1939 was preceded by

considerable internal conflict. Back in February 1939, Heydrich had ordered

Walter Schel enberg, the young rising star of the SD, to develop a concept

for an institutional reorganization of the Security Police and the SD – a

project on which Heydrich’s deputy as head of the Security Police, Werner

Best, had been working for some time. Schel enberg was seven years

younger than Best but no less ambitious, and they were widely perceived as

competitors within Heydrich’s apparatus. Born in Saarbrücken close to the

German–French border in 1910 as the last of seven children of a wealthy

piano manufacturer, Schel enberg had spent his childhood in Luxembourg.

He returned to Germany in the second half of the 1920s, where he studied

medicine and law in Marburg and Bonn. During his time in Bonn,

Schel enberg was approached by two of his professors who acted as recruit-

ment officers for the SD. Schel enberg jumped at the opportunity. Handsome,

bright and praised by his SD superiors as energetic and visionary, he was

soon noticed by Heydrich who assigned him two tasks of particular impor-

tance: in 1938, Schel enberg accompanied Himmler and Heydrich to

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Vienna in order to confiscate Austrian secret service material; the fol owing

year he was put in charge of the political y sensitive mission of abducting

two British secret agents from the neutral Netherlands. It was therefore no

surprise – though perhaps perceived as an insult by Werner Best – that

Heydrich asked Schel enberg to prepare a conceptual paper on the future

merger between the SD and the Security Police.85 On 5 July Schel enberg

presented Heydrich with a comprehensive policy paper, in which he argued

that the SD’s responsibilities should remain clearly separated and autono-

mous from those of the political police: in contrast to the Security Police

and its case-by-case approach to the persecution of criminals, the SD was

to focus on anticipating crime before it occurred, notably by the surveil ance

of al potential opponents of Nazism, both within and outside the Reich’s

borders. In essence, Schel enberg’s paper was aimed at preventing the

absorption of the SD by the Security Police, while simultaneously arguing

for an improvement of the organization’s financial position, which depended

on party subsidies rather than more reliable payments from the state

treasury.86 In a further memorandum of February 1939, Schel enberg reiter-

ated this point, arguing that the police should be absorbed into the party

institution of the SD ‘and not the other way around’ – an argument directed

against Werner Best.87

Best’s response came quickly. Only a few days later, he presented

Heydrich and Schel enberg with a counter-proposal diametrical y opposed

to Schel enberg’s idea: the SD, Best insisted, should be integrated into a

German Security Police, which would amount to a
de facto
takeover of the

SD by the Gestapo. Even more controversial from Schel enberg’s point of

view was Best’s insistence on a uniform training system for the Security

Police’s future leadership corps, a training system in which a university

degree in law – the traditional qualification for the German higher civil

service – would be compulsory. Dismissing Schel enberg’s argument that

the ideological commitment of the police leadership was more important

than its legal training as ‘the high-handedness and short-sightedness of a

self-centred Praetorian Guard’, Best insisted on formal qualifications as a

precondition for leadership positions in the future RSHA, a stance that led

to extreme tensions with the SD. Unlike Best, who had been a judge in the

Weimar Republic, many of the SD’s leaders were not lawyers by training

(although they were often university graduates in other disciplines such as

history, philosophy or literature), and Schel enberg rightly interpreted

Best’s description of the SD leadership as an attack on himself.88

Heydrich sided with Schellenberg and noted in the margin of Best’s

draft that practice-oriented training, not legal studies, should form the

core of the future Security Police leadership’s training.89 He left no doubt

that he did not want lawyers and bureaucrats to run Nazi Germany’s

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

165

Security Police. As he explained to the head of the Order Police, Kurt

Daluege, he had always insisted on ‘pushing the lawyers back to where

they belong, namely into the role of formal legal advisers’.90 It was the

ideologically committed and politically radical SD that should lead the

Security Police, as the struggle against racial and ideological enemies had

to rest in reliable hands. Administrative concerns and legal reservations

could only hamper the regime’s fight against its enemies.91

In essence, the internal conflicts of 1938–9 revolved around the issue of

whether the future leadership of the Nazi repression apparatus should rest

with lawyers or ‘political warriors’.92 After Heydrich’s rejection of his

proposals, Best did not hesitate to make the internal conflict public – a

grave strategic mistake that would seriously strain his relationship with

Heydrich. In two articles, published in
Deutsches Recht
and in the
Deutsche

Allgemeine Zeitung
, Best reiterated his view that lawyers should be at the

top of the future German Security Police.93

Heydrich was infuriated by Best’s decision to make their internal

dispute public, and the affair would ultimately lead to the termination of

their shared career path: in the summer of 1940, Best left the RSHA and

went to Paris where he became head of the Wehrmacht’s civil administra-

tion. Their paths would only cross once again, in May 1942, and, even then

Best would realize that Heydrich had neither forgotten nor forgiven him.94

Based in the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse,

the RSHA consisted of six (and, from March 1941 onwards, seven)

sizeable departments. The administrative heart of the RSHA was

Department I (
Organisation, Verwaltung, Recht
), run by Werner Best until

his departure from Berlin in 1940, and the only department in which

former Gestapo and SD personnel worked side by side.95

Department II (
Gegnerforschung
) was primarily focused on the ‘scien-

tific’ exploration of ideological enemy groups within and outside the

Reich. Heydrich had long been convinced that a fundamental under-

standing of the internal structures, political convictions and work methods

of enemy groups was an essential precondition for fighting them.

Department II mirrored that conviction. Its staff analysed confiscated

documents and provided memoranda on the origins, composition and

aims of broadly defined enemy groups. Under the leadership of the soci-

ology professor Franz Alfred Six, a man who continued his research and

publication career throughout the Second World War, it also exerted

significant influence on university appointments and the recruitment of

new SD leadership personnel with academic backgrounds.96

Department III (
Deutsche Lebensgebiete
) was largely identical with the

SD Inland, Heydrich’s office for the co-ordination of domestic espionage.

Under the leadership of Otto Ohlendorf, it was now divided into four

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

sub-departments responsible for collating intelligence on questions of

ethnicity, law, culture and economy. Most importantly, Ohlendorf ’s

department compiled the regular ‘Meldungen aus dem Reich’, detailed

reports on the general mood of the German population, resistance activi-

ties and other potential dangers to domestic peace, which served as an

important source of information for the Nazi leadership.97

While Departments II and III primarily served as think-tanks within

Heydrich’s terror apparatus, Departments IV (
Gegnerbekämpfung
) and V

(
Kriminalpolizei
) acted as its executive arms. Department IV, the Gestapo,

continued its operational work under the leadership of Heinrich Müller

and played a central role within the RSHA. Responsible for actively

fighting political enemies through arrests, it was divided into five sub-

departments: political enemies (A); religious denominations, Jews,

Freemasons, emigrants, pacificists (B); protective custody (C); occupied

territories (D); and a special desk for co-ordination with the military

intelligence organization, the Abwehr (E). Alongside the department’s

responsibility for protective custody (the commitment of ‘criminals’ to

concentration camps), a separate desk, Eichmann’s desk B4, dealt with

matters of Jewish expulsions and, later in the war, their extermination.98

Its clearly defined task of persecuting political and racial enemies of the

Nazi regime provided Department IV with a clear advantage vis-à-vis the

SD and the understaffed Department V, the former Reich Criminal

Police Office under Arthur Nebe, which was responsible for matters of

‘crime prevention’ and the the arrest of ‘ordinary’ criminals, although the

increasingly biological interpretation of criminals blurred the areas of

responsibility between the Gestapo and the criminal police.99

With a total of thirty-eight desks, Department VI (
SD Ausland
),

responsible for foreign intelligence gathering, was the largest – but by no

means the most powerful – department within the RSHA. First under the

leadership of the young ex-lawyer Heinz Jost, then under Walter

Schellenberg, the department was remarkably amateurish, with limited

experience in espionage and enjoying very little success. Although espio-

nage networks were set up in neutral countries such as Switzerland,

Sweden, Spain and Portugal, as well as South-eastern Europe, its impact

in Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union was barely

noticeable. In a desperate attempt to chalk up some success, Department

VI even set up a brothel in Berlin, the Salon Kitty, where foreign diplo-

mats and suspected spies within the Nazi bureaucracy were hooked up