Gestapo (2 page)

The original function of the S.S. was to provide a personal bodyguard for Hitler in the days of his struggle for power. S.S. stands for
Schutz Staffel
, or Guard Detachment, and the members of the S.S. in those early days belonged to Hitler alone and were devoted to him body and soul. They formed, organizationally, a part of the S.A., the brown-shirted Storm Troops, who represented the military arm of the Nazi Party, and who were used to intimidate opposition and beat up, or murder, those who would not be intimidated. But the S.S. in their black uniforms soon came to regard themselves as members of a race apart and to look down on the numerically far superior S.A.

When Hitler discovered Heinrich Himmler, the S.S., under Erwin Heiden, were only two hundred eighty strong. That was in 1929. Already there had been stirrings of antagonism between Hitler and the leaders of the S.A. Hitler had set himself the task of capturing the Wehrmacht and the bankers and the industrialists to assist him in his rise. The S.A., led by Hitler's old friend and supporter, Ernst Roehm, was fundamentally a revolutionary army and, as such, had nothing but contempt for bankers and industrialists: at the same time they saw themselves as swallowing up the Wehrmacht and doing away with the stiff-necked General Staff. It was this conflict between the political leader and his brawling, strong-arm corner boys that led to the rise of Himmler and the S.S. Hitler needed a private army, but it had to be obedient and regard itself as his instrument. In Himmler he found a man whose chief
qualities seemed to be blind loyalty, a certain organizational flair, and an impassioned faith in all the nonsense he chose to propagate about race and honor.

In quieter times Himmler might never have discovered his peculiar gifts. He was trained as an agriculturalist, had acted as a fertilizer salesman, and had finished up running a poultry farm in a Bavarian village. His brother has gone on doing that sort of thing ever since. He himself might very well have lived out his days in this innocent activity, quiet and efficient, but prevented by temperamental caution from becoming a tycoon, and remarkable for the number of bees in his bonnet—a harmless crank: the sort of man who combines business acumen with a belief in the secret of the pyramids. He was essentially a romantic. The undistinguished, puffy countenance concealed visions. The son of a small official, he was infected early with the romanticism of the German Youth Movement. He developed a passion for the good earth and the regeneration of Germany through an enlightened peasantry. Later he was to bring to the task of exterminating millions of human beings the spirit of the eternal
Wandervogel
.

Although he pinned his faith to Hitler in the first days of the movement and actually marched as Roehm's standard-bearer on the occasion of the farcical
Bierhalle Putsch
, he had no comprehension of the true inwardness of his Leader, and found himself attracted to the radical wing of the Party, which would have no truck with the Ruhr financiers. Thus one day he was taken up by Gregor Strasser, who, with Goebbels at his side, made a strong bid for the leadership of the Party after the failure of the
Putsch
. He became Strasser's adjutant.

This sounds grander than it was; for it should be remembered that the Nazi Party was very young and extremely disreputable. The men who were going to build the most terrible fighting force in the world, and then break it, were by the standards of more mature societies callow and raw. (We hear a great deal in these days about youth having its chance and the stifling influence of old men in office; but the two parts of the world in which youth has had its chance, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, have not made the best of impressions.)

In due course both Strasser and Goebbels were to be
won over by Hitler's uncanny sense of reality; and the Fuehrer saw in Strasser's unprepossessing lieutenant the sort of man he needed for his bodyguard: utterly loyal—
treuer Heinrich
, he came to be called—quietly and unemotionally efficient, and so literal-minded that he could be relied upon to take at the foot of the letter anything in writing that came from an acknowledged authority.

All attempts to analyze the character of Himmler have failed, as I think all must fail—unless, perhaps, in casebook form with a far fuller documentation than exists—because they entail the understanding of a madman in terms of normal human experience. For if there is one thing clear about Himmler, it is that he was amiably and to some degree contentedly mad. Madness is a loose term. It is used here to characterize a man adrift from normal human experience. It is impossible to analyze Himmler's motives, because to understand a character one must be capable to some extent of entering into his thoughts and feelings and obtaining a recognizable idea of the world as it appears to him. This can be done with a number of Himmler's assistants, who were unbalanced to a degree and ogrish in their conduct. But it cannot be done with Himmler, because he was one of those terrifying human beings foreign to normal human behavior. He was not distinguished by cruelty, by lust, by excessive vanity, by overweening ambition, by systematic deceitfulness. His qualities were unremarkable, vices and virtues alike. But there was no center: the qualties simply did not cohere.

There are men like Himmler in the prisons and criminal lunatic asylums all over the world—and, more fortunately placed by virtue of the possession of private incomes, leading retired and slightly dotty lives in seaside bungalows along our coasts. They are the sort of men, good husbands and fathers, kind to animals, gentle, hesitant, soft-spoken, absorbed in some mild hobby and probably very good at it, who murder their wives because they wish to marry another girl and flinch from the scandal of a divorce. As a rule such men are not particularly gifted, if only because the total number of particularly gifted men is small. Himmler, however, was an extremely gifted administrator.

He believed not only in the German race; he also believed in astrology and runes. With Hitler's Reich crashing
down over him, and in the supreme moment of his life when he was prepared to betray Hitler and take on the leadership of the broken German people, he interrupted his conversations with Count Bernadotte, designed to lead Germany out of the war, in order to hold forth about the hidden secrets of Nordic runes. He was convinced that if they could be deciphered they would prove to have a close affinity with the characters of the Japanese alphabet; and this was extremely important, because it would mean that the Japanese, in spite of their alien appearance, were in fact also Aryans and thus fit allies of the Germans. The only thing Hitler knew about race was that he hated the Jews and considered them the root of all evil. But for Himmler this was not propaganda. When he called a Slav an animal, he meant precisely that, with no ill-feeling; and it oppressed him to think that Germany was allied with a people who were, on the face of it, subhuman.

He went through life like this. In the middle of transacting arrangements for the extermination of whole peoples he pursued with no less care and far greater enthusiasm his own real interests. The activities of the Gestapo and the S.D., the building of gas chambers, the massacre of prisoners of war, were simply routine police matters: unpleasant chores in the life of a man who was devoted to making the world fit for Germans to live in. The development of the S.S. Institute for Anthropological Research, however, was something after his own heart. He was determined to discover the secret of Aryan origins, and rich men subscribed millions of marks to this project in order to be numbered among Himmler's friends. For him the Russian war offered a glorious opportunity for comparative anatomy: while immense armies were maneuvring over the the frozen plains and smashing each other to pieces, Himmler set himself the urgent task of building up a collection of skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars: such things were impossible to come by in Germany.

The story of this collection of skulls, with the Allies drawing closer to Strasbourg, where they were deposited, provided one of the few moments of farce in the grim drama of the trials of the war criminals. The instructions as to their collection and preservation, issued in all solemnity in the midst of a world toppling in ruins by a man
who had not the faintest idea that he was doing anything out of the ordinary, illuminate very clearly the nature of Himmler's lunacy. It is worth quoting
in extenso
the report of Professor Hirt, director of the Anatomical Institute of Strasbourg, who was also a departmental chief in Himmler's
Ahnenerbe:

“Subject: Securing skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars for the purpose of scientific research at the Reich University at Strasbourg.

“We have a large collection of skulls of almost all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimen skulls are available. …The war in the East now presents us with the chance of overcoming this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material.”

Professor Hirt then goes on to emphasize the necessity of catching the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars alive, so that scientific measurements can be made by qualified persons before death:

“The best practical method of obtaining and collecting this skull material is to direct the Wehrmacht to turn over alive all captured Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars to the
Feldpolizei
. The
Feldpolizei
, in turn, should be given special directives to inform a certain office at regular intervals of the numbers of these captured Jews and where they are detained, and to give them every attention and care until a special delegate arrives. This special delegate, who will be in charge of securing the material (a junior physician of the Wehrmacht or the
Feldpolizei
, or a medical student, equipped with a motorcar and driver), will be required to take a previously agreed series of photographs, make anthropological measurements, and, in addition, determine as far as possible ancestry, date of birth, and other personal data.”

When that much has been accomplished the unfortunates can be put to death and the serious business proceeded with:

“Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician
will sever the head from the body and will forward it to its proper point of destination in a hermetically sealed tin can especially made for this purpose and filled with preservative fluid. Having arrived at the laboratory, the comparison tests and anatomical research on the skull, as well as the determination of the race membership and of pathological features of the skull form, the form and size of the brain, etc., can be undertaken by photographs, measurements, and other data supplied on the head and skull itself.”

This was the world in which Himmler existed. He believed absolutely in the subhumanness of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars. When foreign diplomats occasionally suggested that his conduct verged on the brutal, he was completely and sadly uncomprehending. “But they are animals,” he would say. And to him they were. He had no more qualms about cutting off the heads of Russian Jews and sending them in tin cans to Strasbourg than the trained pathologist has about killing animals for dissection. The Jews, like the animals, were to be well cared for until they were put to death.… Or perhaps that is an oversimplification. All the reports agree that Himmler suffered the most atrocious headaches, which on occasion nearly drove him frantic, that he was hesitant in arriving at decisions, that he did suffer and was sometimes appalled at the necessity of such wholesale slaughter. But from all descriptions of this conscientious man it seeems likely that the headaches came not from a battle with conscience so much as from a battle with his sense of responsibility. What was difficult was to decide what was necessary. Once that was decided, there were no more hesitations.

It was in this spirit that he presided over the appalling experiments on living human beings carried out by a remarkable assortment of doctors in the concentration camps of the S.S. These experiments had nothing to do with the Gestapo, as such. The Gestapo delivered the prisoners as a routine matter, and the concentration camp commanders, on direct orders from Himmler, saw to the rest. Dachau was the principal center for this particular horror; but experiments of one kind or another went on in most of the camps. At Neuengamme, for example, Dr. Heisskeyer carried out a series of experiments on Jewish
children, injecting them with T.B., and watching them die—until the advance of the Allies spoiled the beauty of the experiments, and the children had to be killed prematurely to remove all traces of Dr. Heisskeyer's activities.

The heroes of Dachau were Dr. Sigmund Rascher of the Luftwaffe, Dr. Schillings the malaria specialist, and Dr. Schutz, who was interested in blood poisoning. Dr. Rascher was the chief of these, and he was Himmler's special favorite. A charming, well-spoken, and resourceful man, Rascher applied himself single-mindedly to experiments designed to save the lives of German Luftwaffe crews. Prisoners were used freely to discover what happened to pilots without oxygen at high altitudes and when immersed for varying periods in icy water. What happened was that they died. There was a special van, to hold twenty-five men, with an observation window in the side, from which air was progressively extracted until the prisoners in the van started dying of hemorrhage of lung or brain: those who survived were usually killed. There was a tank full of ice-cold water in which other prisoners were placed and kept until they became unconscious. Blood was taken from the neck each time the body temperature fell by one degree, and analyzed. One man was kept alive at nineteen degrees Centigrade, but most died at twenty-five or twenty-six degrees. One aspect of these experiments was the attempted resuscitation of men apparently dead. Sunlamps, hot-water bottles, electrotherapy were all tried in vain, until somebody had the brilliant idea that the application of animal warmth might do the trick—the animal warmth was to be provided by women. It was a new use for prostitutes, and a number of these unsuspecting females were earmarked for this purpose on Himmler's direct instructions to Pohl, his deputy for concentration camps: his only proviso was that they had to be non-German prostitutes.