When Hindenburg died and Hitler supplanted him, the generals took a new oath of allegiance to him personally. There was no force in Germany to make them do this. They did it of their own free will. It was to tie their hands, or to serve as an excuse for refusing to act in the interests of decency, for ten more squalid yearsâuntil most of them could no longer recognize decency when they saw it. That was the first chance.
Their second chance came in what was to prove their first and last major engagement with the Gestapo. Heydrich all but overreached himself, as he was to overreach himself in Austria with the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss. But the generals let him win. It was a bloodless victory.
No general died in the action which led to the final demoralization of the High Command.
This was one of the Gestapo actions not mentioned by the Prosecution at Nuremberg. It was achieved by the now familiar means of a frameup. In January, 1938, the Minister of Defense, Field Marshal von Blomberg, an aging widower, marrying for the second time, chose a typist in the War Ministry, Frauelein Erna Gruehn. Goering assisted in this operation by sending off to South America a younger aspirant for the hand of Frauelein Gruehn. Hitler gave his blessing. But soon afterwards Berlin was alive with the most astonishing rumors, and the rumors were true. Frauelein Gruehn was found to have a police record: there was a routine dossier in existence showing her to have been a professional prostitute, and clipped to the dossier were photographs of the most compromising kind.
The Gestapo had nothing to do with this discovery. It was accidental; and the Police President of Berlin, Count Helldorf (although a Nazi, Helldorf retained to the end certain feelings of decency, and paid for these ultimately with his life) immediately decided that on no account must Himmler know anything about the affair. He knew what would happen. Innocently he took the dossier for advice to von Blomberg's own son-in-law, who had risen from obscurity by the unfortunate Field Marshal's grace, and was now head of the
Wehrmachtamt
in the Ministry of War. The son-in-law was Wilhelm Keitel (who never had any feelings of decency, and was to pay for this ultimately with his life.) Keitel would have liked to save his old father-in-law, just as later he would have liked to have saved the hundreds of thousands who were shot by the Wehrmacht or handed over to the Gestapo in every country in Europe. He was fond of the old man. But there was nothing he could do without risking his career. And that was not to be considered. So he took the dossier to Goering. And Goering, full of pleasurable anticipation, took it to Hitler, who had one of his fits. Meanwhile the news got round. And Himmler began to move.
In the coming and going of the next few days, with demands for Blomberg's immediate resignation, divorce, expulsion from the officers corpsâwith Hitler vacillating as usualâthere was one purposeful figure: Himmler, with
Heydrich behind him. For the next move was to appoint a successor to von Blomberg as Minister of Defense. The next in line of succession was von Fritsch. But Goering himself coveted the office; and although Himmler did not in the least want to see Goering in that particular chair he was prepared to put up with it if he could get rid of von Fritsch. He thought he could do so, and in such a way that von Fritsch's disgrace, coming on top of the von Blomberg scandal, would shatter the confidence and unity, as well as the popular reputation, of the General Staff for ever.
What Hitler minded most was homosexuality among his national leadersânot, as far as is known, because he had any particular objection to it as such, but because he was trying to build up a system admired for its puritanical morality. So von Fritsch was to be cast as a homosexual. It was easy enough. Heydrich managed to dig up an underworld character, a professional blackmailer who specialized in well-to-do homosexuals. He featured in an existing dossier about a junior cavalry officer called Fritsch. He was threatened by Heydrich and told he would be killed if he refused to identify General von Fritsch as the man Fritsch from whom he had extorted sums in the past. The confrontation took place in the presence of Hitler. Von Fritsch, who had coldly and categorically denied the charge against him, was so outraged when the disreputable figure emerged from a side door and made his identification that he became incoherent and could find no words. Hitler immediately assumed his guilt.
It was not one of the more polished Gestapo actions. Very soon the truth was widely known, and at the Court of Enquiry the blackmailer broke down and told the whole story. But the damage had been done. Only resolute and violent action on the part of von Fritsch could save the situation. All those who had been waiting impatiently for the pretext for such action, which would sweep the filth of Nazidom away, thought the moment had come. But von Fritsch preferred the way of proud resignationâor sulking. “At the moment of confluence of his own Fate with that of Germany, he was found wanting,” in the words of Wheeler-Bennett, who goes on to use an image so crude and raw that for a moment the reader is shockedâuntil he realizes that, in the end, the Chief of the great General
Staff deserved no more resounding epitaph: “The Man of Steel, the Hero of the Army, bewildered and shocked by what had happened, at that moment of destiny resembled a cross between a puzzled virgin and a petrified rabbit.”
Hitler himself took over the Army. Von Blomberg's son-in-law, Keitel, as head of the newly constituted O.K.W., became Hitler's military mouthpiece. Himmler, with Hitler now concerned almost exclusively with military matters, became effective master of Germany.
The third chance of the generals came with the outbreak of war. They could have stopped it; they wanted to stop it; but they did nothing. The Gestapo, as such, for once had nothing to do with this, it is a pleasure to record.
The Gestapo set the scene for the outbreak, however. And since this was the first major excursion of the Gestapo into the international field, since it shows how that organization, after its modest start, had now become privy to the highest secrets of State; since, finally, although it involved the actual killing of only a dozen individuals, it inaugurated a movement of destruction spectacular even by the standards of Himmlerâbecause of all this it is worth recording in detail.
The Gestapo were called upon, in their capacity of “dustbin of the Reich,” to fake the frontier incidents which were to be Hitler's excuse for attacking Poland. The whole operation was known as “Undertaking Himmler.” It involved more than one incident, organized between them by Heydrich and Mueller. But the one we know most about was run by Alfred Helmut Naujocks of the S.D., already referred to, who was to fake an attack by Polish troops on Gleiwitz radio station, just inside the German border. It had to be done without Poles. Naujocks said in his sworn affidavit, presented at Nuremberg:
“On or about August 10th, 1939, the Chief of the Sipo and S.D., Heydrich, personally ordered me to simulate an attack on the radio station near Gleiwitz, near the Polish border, and to make it appear that the attacking force consisted of Poles. Heydrich said, âactual proof of these attacks of the Poles is needed for the foreign Press, as well as for German propaganda purposes.' I was directed to go to Gleiwitz with five or six S.D. men and wait there until I received a code word
from Heydrich indicating that the attack should take place.”
He was to seize the radio station when he got the code word, and hold it long enough to let a Polish-speaking German, detailed for the purpose, make an inflammatory speech into the microphone. The speech, according to Heydrich, was to exhort Poland to a show-down with Germany and urge the Poles to take immediate action. Heydrich also told Naujocks that he expected Germany would attack Poland “in a few days.”
So Naujocks went to Gleiwitz and hung about. He was bored and thought nothing would happen, and after a fortnight asked if he could return to Berlin, but Heydrich told him to stay where he was. Then:
“Between the 25th and 31st of August I went to see Heinrich Mueller, head of the Gestapo, who was then near by at Oppeln. In my presence Mueller discussed with a man named Mellhorn plans for another border incident, in which it should be made to appear that Polish soldiers were attacking German troops.⦠Germans in the approximate strength of a company were to be used. Mueller stated that he had twelve or thirteen condemned criminals who were to be dressed in Polish uniforms and left dead on the ground at the scene of the incident to show that they had been killed while attacking. For this purpose they were to be given fatal injections by a doctor employed by Heydrich. They were then also to be given gunshot wounds. After the assault, members of the Press and other persons were to be taken to the spot of the incident. A police report was subsequently to be prepared.”
It was Mueller who told Naujocks that he could have one of these “criminals” for his own use to add verisimilitude to his own incident. The “criminals” had a code name, which showed that Mueller had as good a sense of humor as any English police officer. The code name was “Canned Goods.”
Naujocks continues:
“The incident at Gleiwitz in which I participated was carried out on the evening preceding the attack on Poland. As I recall, war broke out on September 1st,
1939. At noon on August 31st, I received by telephone from Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take place at eight o'clock that evening. Heydrich said, âIn order to carry out this attack, report to Mueller for “Canned Goods.” ' I did this and gave Mueller instructions to deliver the man near the radio station. I received this man and had him laid in the entrance to the station. He was alive, but he was completely unconscious. I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognize by his eyes that he was alive, only by his breathing. I did not see the shot wounds, but a lot of blood was smeared across his face. He was in civilian clothes.
“We seized the radio station as ordered, broadcast a speech of three to four minutes over an emergency transmitter, fired some pistol shots, and left.”
If it is asked what the Gestapo did with itself in the long, dull intervals between the highlights of its career, when it was not massacring the S.A. leaders, or breaking the power of the Generals, or touching off the Second World War, the general answer is that it was perfecting its machine and thinking up ideas for the day when it would have more people to kill than could conceivably be spared inside Germany. It had plenty of time to run its machinery in and discover the weak spots. It managed to get in good practice of the most realistic kind when first Austria, then, by stages, Czechoslovakia, were overrun. And inside Germany itself it was able in peace and quiet to develop its technique of persecution and oppression.
There was no organized resistance by the time Himmler had taken over. The last time the braver and soberer German masses made their voices heard was during the March elections in 1933, when, after a month of S.A. rule, there were still twenty-two million Germans out of thirty-nine million with the courage to vote against Hitler. With the banning of political parties three months later, and the smashing of the Trade Unions, there was no more sectional opposition. But there was incessant grumbling and a great deal of sporadic underground activity, which, but for the vigilance of Heydrich, would soon have made itself felt. All over Germany groups of anti-Nazi workers were meeting in secret, and it was the job of Heydrich's S.D., with its fabulous network of honorary informers, to smell
out this activity. Then, as a rule, it was the job of Himmler's Gestapo to investigate more closely, often by insinuating one of its own agents into a group of dissidents, before taking action. There were many actions of this kind between 1934 and 1939 of which the outside world heard nothing, and the prisons and concentration camps were filled with the victims.
One that the world did hear about, rather belatedly, was the case of the Stettin group, which involved the arrest of two hundred and eighty factory workers in 1936, their being held in prison for eleven months “on remand,” and being sentenced to terms ranging from one to six years for a variety of offenses: the reading of prohibited newspapers (one to two years); the passing on of prohibited newspapers (two to three years); using a private dwelling as a meeting place (three years); enrolling new members (three to four years); working on an illegal newspaper (four to six years). This was one aspect of life in Germany in the days when people looked over their shoulders before mentioning politics in case there might be someone standing by who could be an agent (unpaid) of the Gestapo or the S.D.
The general idea was to produce an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion, a sort of all-enveloping fog, through which naked terror might suddenly loom to destroy the individual. The Nazi authorities made no bones about the fact that the job of the Gestapo was not so much to capture and punish individuals who had acted against the interests of the Fuehrer State as to arrest on suspicion before action could be taken.
“The number of criminal proceedings continually pending in the People's Court for treasonable acts against
Land
or Reich is the result of this work,” wrote the
Volkischer Beobachter
early in 1936, in an article glorifying the Gestapo and the S.D. “As, since the National Socialist revolution, all open struggle and all open opposition to the State and to the leadership of the State is forbidden, a secret State Police as a preventive instrument in the struggle against all dangers threatening the State is indissolubly bound up with the National Socialist Fuehrer State. The opponents of National Socialism were not eliminated by the prohibition of their
organizations and newspapers, but have withdrawn to other forms of opposition to the State.” The newspaper then went on to explain the role of the S.D.
“The preventive measures of the Secret State Police consist first of all in the close surveillance of all enemies of the State in the Reich territory. As the Secret State Police cannot, in addition to its important executive tasks, perform this surveillance of the enemies of the State to the extent necessary, there enters to supplement it, the Security Service of the Reichsfuehrer of the S.S., set up by the Fuehrer's deputy as the political intelligence service of the Movement, putting thereby into the service of the security of the State a large part of the forces of the Movement mobilized by him.”