The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (12 page)

It must be acknowledged that he proceeded against these movements with great severity, in fact partially even ignoring the legal regulations and norms. It is no less clear, however, that Muller, had it been his task, would have proceeded just the same
against the Right. With his vast ambition and relentless drive, he would have done everything to win the appreciation of whoever might happen to be his boss in a given system.47

Like Diels in Prussia, incidentally, he was said to prefer the appointment of men under him who had either served less than he or were dependent upon him, or just less competent. 'When it came to the selection of these officials, he took no political considerations into account, because he had merely his own egoistic aims in mind.'48

Muller had not been a member of the NSDAP before 1933-nor was he at the time of his political evaluation-and was not active in any of its affiliated organizations. The local Party district headquarters recommended that Muller should not get the promotion for which he was in line in 1937, because he had done nothing of merit for the Nazi cause. He had risen to the top without Party approval, in part because his chief Heydrich thought it an advantage not to have connections to the Party. Heydrich wanted to curtail the influence of the NSDAP almost from the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor.4v

When Heydrich and the Nazis decided to take over the Munich Metropolitan Police building on 9 March 1933, Muller and Franz Josef Huber (among others), another prominent official who was to have a successful career in the Gestapo, offered some resistance. Local Police President Julius Koch was promptly deposed, but, rather than dropping Muller, Heydrich decided to take advantage of his knowledge of the Communists and his expertise in police business. On both counts Muller was worth keeping, all the more as he changed his attitude to Nazism, or at least served his new bosses as though he did.

Franz Josef Huber, who had been in charge of looking after the Nazis in the Munich police before 1933, was also permitted to stay. Like Muller, he was young (born in 1902), and the son of a Catholic policeman. In Huber's file there is a very negative political evaluation (also from 1937, on the occasion of a promotion inside the Gestapo), even more critical than the one on Muller. Huber was branded an informer who went around denouncing colleagues just before the 'seizure of power' for using the greeting 'Heil Hitler!' It was 'completely out of the question that he had changed his political views'. If he acted as though he had given up his 'ultramontane views', then this was purely to survive in his job. The evaluator reported that Huber feared being dismissed because of his well-known hatred of National Socialism prior to 1933, but thought that dismissal seemed more 'appropriate' than a
promotion!5'
Huber too was nevertheless given this promotion (and many more), eventually ending up as Gestapo chief in Vienna in the same year (1939) that Muller was made Gestapo chief in the RSHA.

Only a systematic analysis of a broader sample of the Gestapo across Germany would establish just how representative the above examples are. At the very highest levels of the police, to be sure, expertise was important, but political (Nazi) background and personal relationships with Himmler or Heydrich were crucial.51
Robert Koehl maintains that while the sixteen Inspectors of the Security Police and SD, whose very titles implied 'a firmer union of SS and Police, and included several old and convinced SS officers from 1931-1932 days, the bulk of the Security Police were professional police officials who had risen through co-operation with Heydrich. They exemplified the traits of conscientious bureaucrats willing to serve the Nazi cause rather than of devoted SS men.'
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4. GESTAPO OFFICIALS IN WURZBURG

According to Himmler's decree of 15 July 193 7, the Gestapo in Bavaria was in future to be organized as follows. There was one Leading Gestapo post (Staatspolizeileitstelle), responsible for the district of Munich-Upper Bavaria, with four ordinary posts (Staatspolizeistellen) in the administrative centres of the four remaining government districts. In Wurzburg, Duty Station (Dien- ststelle) 9, the political police of the 19205 was changed in 1929 into the 'state police administration'. As of I April 1933, as indicated above, all such sections through Bavaria came under Himmler as Bavaria's Police Commander. The law of 1937 confirmed the changes in Munich's Metropolitan Police and gave the Munich Gestapo the right to issue orders to the other posts in Bavaria, obtain records from them, and so on. It also changed the earlier political sections of all police directories into 'independent authorities'. Thus, four (central) Gestapo posts appeared in Augsburg, NurembergFurth, Regensburg, and Wurzburg. All local Gestapo posts were at once directly responsible to Berlin headquarters (the Gestapa) although in theory they were also to inform the relevant local administrative heads (Regi- erungsprasidenten). In addition, as shown below, the local Gestapo could
call on the ordinary police, mayors, magistrates, and so on as auxiliaries (Hilfsorgane). Matters relevant to the Gestapo which came to the attention of these latter groups were to be forwarded.53

Co-operation between the Gestapo and the incumbent state authorities seems by and large to have worked well, as in the persecution of the Jews, for example, and even in the organization and execution of the deportations.54
There were to be further changes in the organization of the political police in Bavaria and in other states, as Himmler, Heydrich, Best, and others sought to create a genuinely national police (Reichspolizei), but the Gestapo in Bavaria persisted in the pattern established in 1937.

The information which would be required to give a detailed and exact plan of work of the Gestapo in Wurzburg did not survive, but there was a considerable degree of centralization and standardization across the country: what has already been said about the organization of local Gestapo posts also applied there. When it comes to the personnel, it is possible to reconstruct some of the story on the basis of materials now located in the Berlin Document Centre. The 1937 survey mentioned earlier placed twenty-two Gestapo officials in Wurzburg, of whom only eleven were on active duty (AuBendienst), that is, not preoccupied with administration; in Aschaffenburg there was an outpost (AuBendienststelle), with six additional officials. Together, these people were responsible for all of Lower Franconia's population of 84o,663.55
The number of officials there and everywhere else increased with the coming of war and with the assignment of new duties related to war measures, including keeping watch on prisoners of war and foreign workers.

It is possible to identify many, but not all, of the men who at one time or another were part of the Wurzburg Gestapo. Career patterns there seem consistent with those already mentioned, and there was no purge of the police. Links with the Nazi Party, SS, or SA developed slowly. Only two Gestapo members-Josef Gerum and Ernst Gramowski-joined the Party before 1933, and, significantly, both rose to the top in the Third Reich, at one time or another becoming leaders of the local Gestapo. Several other men moved to the NSDAP in 1933, and some joined various Nazi formations. These early joiners (Heisig, Vogel, Volkl, and Wittmann) also had successful careers. Virtually all the others stayed out of the NSDAP itself until the 'loosening' (Lockerung) of Party membership in 1937. In fact, because nearly all those in the Wurzburg Gestapo joined as of 1 May 1937, they were probably advised to get on the Party books. Those who came to the Gestapo later, and who were not in the Party, joined the Party almost at the same time as they moved into the political police.

It was certainly possible for people to join the NSDAP in the years between 1933 and May 1937; in fact, the membership increased more or less steadily. After May 1937 there was a dramatic increase, when whole groups of civil servants, like the Gestapo, made the move.56
Reich Minister of Justice Giirtner indicated in letters to officials in his jurisdiction in February 1937 that he 'expected' them to join the Nazi Party; this suggestion was very likely also made to the police, including the Gestapo.57
A Bamberg judge later explained that there were also positive inducements to join when in May 1937 admission to the NSDAP became easier. Many joined because `it was obvious to the servants of justice that a non-Party member could expect neither promotion nor advancement'.58

Those who served in the Wurzburg Gestapo seem virtually without exception-at least so far as it has been possible to determine-to have been career policemen, or had been specifically trained (however briefly) for the police before 1933. There were blatant political appointees, especially at the top, when, for example, `deserving' Party member and `old fighter' Josef Gerum was handed the leadership of the Wurzburg post in April 1934. Though his political credentials were impeccable-in the Party since 1920, participant in the abortive Hitler putsch in 1923, jailed (for four months) with the Fi hrer himself in Landsberg prison-Gerum was also a trained policeman, and was in the Bavarian police (if at the lowliest rank) already in 1917. Gerum and those like him in the senior ranks, who had the appropriate political views, were selected at least in part because of their technical training. The nonpolitical types who stayed at their desks implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the regime and the definitions of the tasks of the police. They may not have been card-carrying members of the Party, but they were hardly opponents of the system.

The appendix to this chapter (p. 76) lists all those who served at one time or another in Wurzburg. Not included are the clerical staff (mainly women) or the officials from Nuremberg, who became closely involved in the Wurzburg post's activities when, in the summer of 1941, the Wurzburg Gestapo post lost its independence and became a branch of the Nuremberg operation.59

Ascribing motives to those who joined the Gestapo is problematical. Hannah Arendt characterized Adolf Eichmann, a man in many ways representative of the policeman in the Third Reich, with the label `banality of evil'. Most of them were neither crazed, demented, nor superhuman, but
terribly ordinary. According to his own testimony in Jerusalem, Eichmann, a man at one stage in charge of sending countless thousands to Auschwitz, was not an anti-Semite.fi0
He was a perfect example of the 'compartmental' thinker, one who insisted that he had never taken a decision on his own, but could point to either a 'relevant Reich law' or 'implementation orders' or 'police regulations, the decrees, orders, and instructions of Himmler and the head of Security Police as legislative basis'.'

The historian Shlomo Aronson and others offer some speculation as to why some stayed in their jobs. These conjectures are worth recalling because they probably apply to many other officials beyond the more important central characters such as Muller and Huber. For most it was preferable to stay rather than to give up their cherished careers, after long years of apprenticeship and, with few other prospects in view, especially because of the massive unemployment throughout the country. From 30 January 1933 it was obvious that the police in general (and the political police particularly) were going to become much more important than before, so that if one could hang on in the transition phase career prospects were almost certainly going to improve. Besides these kinds of self-aggrandizing motives, other factors came into play, some of which have already been mentioned, such as the desire for `law and order'.

Aronson's portrayal of Muller suggests a somewhat uncritical adoption of the 'apolitical German civil servant', a man who felt good only in his office."z
Similarly, Friedrich Panzinger, a colleague of Muller in Munich before 1933, who rose with him later in Berlin (also a non-Party member until 1937), said that Muller never acted out of 'fanatical devotion to the Fizhrer', as the saying went, but from a sense of 'traditional duty to the profession in which he found himself; 'it would have appeared to him as cowardice and treason to leave it'.63
An alternative view of Muller is offered by Walter Schellenberg, a man who got to know and dislike him. Though Muller may or may not have been a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, he was certainly not against some form of authoritarian state with a secret police. He shocked Schellenberg during a conversation in the spring of 1943 by lauding the Stalinist system, in which a 'unified and really uncompromising spiritual and biological force' was developing. Muller said that the problem with Nazism was that it made 'too many compromises', whereas the Communists had 'a consistent attitude to life' which was 'lacking among most of our Western intellectuals, excepting perhaps some of the SS'. Muller said he was forced to conclude that in all
important respects, when the Soviet leader was compared to Hitler 'Stalin does ... things better'.6'
Muller had definite ideas about how the country should be run, and these are poorly described by the term 'apolitical'.

The new regime and its leading policemen, such as Himmler and Heydrich, held out positive inducements to such people. The absence of unity and lack of central control of the political police from the days of Weimar were over, and a new sense of legitimacy was conferred upon the police not enjoyed since the days of Imperial Germany.The country was 'co-ordinated', and so were efforts to fight crime. In his efforts against Communism before 1933, Muller and people like him had been frustrated by the ways Weimar offered a modicum of protection for the accused. He had then threatened to overstep legal boundaries; now he was given official sanction and encouragement.

5. THE GESTAPO SPY NETWORK

Little information has survived on the Gestapo spy network, one thought by contemporaries to be so extensive that escape from surveillance was all but impossible. This group was in fact much smaller than believed, but Werner Best was going too far when he nearly denied its existence altogether. At the Nuremberg trials he said that it was not true 'that the Gestapo had a net of spies and information agencies which kept track of the entire people'."
But a group of informers was linked to the Gestapo on a regular basis-although one should not inflate its size and the number of undercover agents.