HERMANN GORING: NUMBER TWO
The top leadership of
the party can be divided into two types according to the way they came to adopt
a self-sufficient, completely unideological dynamic: those who were born National
Socialists and those who became National Socialists. Joseph Goebbels was the prototype
of the latter. . . . In contrast to this type there were the ‘born’ National Socialists,
men with a spontaneous urge to prove themselves in struggle, and an
unreflecting, elemental hunger for power. Such men had never had any theoretical
conceptions to give up. They were ‘fighters’ and in most cases marked by their
experiences at the front during the war, modern mercenaries who would change
flags and views for an appropriate ‘reward.’ For them there was now an
opportunity extending beyond the war and the chaos of the collapse to use their
military talents in civilian life, coupled with the promise of power.
Ambitious,
straightforward and ruthless, they did not suffer at the hands of the world like
the ideological type, but wanted to possess or enjoy it. They did not, like the
ideologist, think of future generations, but at best of the next day, or even
the next hour. Their prototype was Hermann Goring; a contemporary called him “the
great representative of the national Socialist movement.” He said himself, “I
joined the party because I was a revolutionary, not because of any ideological
nonsense.”
Hermann Goring was true
to type. What governed him from the beginning and led him to follow Hitler was
simply his absolute will to power. He made his name and acquired his status
because he knew how to fight resolutely for power as almost no one else did,
and he almost lost them both because he enjoyed them as almost no one else did:
shamelessly, naively and greedily, always in too large draughts. Pompous and on
the verge of ridiculous, he was a mixture of condottiere and sybarite. He was as
vain, cunning and brutal as any other follower of Hitler, and yet he was more popular
than any of them and for a time actually more popular than Hitler himself.
By the end of the war
in 1918 he was commander of the Richthofen Fighter Squadron, which was rich in
tradition. He combined the romantic aura of the much-decorated fighter pilot
with the rough unaffected intimacy of the boon companion, at one and the same
time hero and hail-fellow-well-met. And although as an orator he lacked both
propagandist subtlety and a feeling for the undefined emotions at work in a
mass audience, he nevertheless knew how to take a crowd as it wants to be
taken: roughly, humorously, without beating about the bush. His aristocratic
background, which he emphasized with the deliberate intention of setting
himself apart from the rest of Hitler’s followers, spared him any feelings of
inferiority, the feelings of petty bourgeois who had come down in the world
which were so characteristic of the men who later became the leaders of the
National Socialist Party.
The backbone of his
personality gradually disintegrated under Hitler's influence and he lapsed into
undignified subservience. This, to begin with, he celebrated in wildly emotional
terms. “I have no conscience! Adolf Hitler is my conscience!” he once exclaimed.
On another occasion he said:
"If the Catholic
Christian is convinced that the Pope is infallible in all religious and ethical
matters, so we National Socialists declare with the same ardent conviction that
for us too the Fuhrer is absolutely infallible in all political and other
matters. It is a blessing for Germany that in Hitler the rare union has taken
place between the most acute logical thinker and truly profound philosopher and
the iron man of action, tenacious to the limit. [And again] I follow no
leadership but that of Adolf Hitler and of God!"
Goring’s energy was
also responsible for certain important interim successes on the way to power.
Hitler's reward for the “movement's diplomatist” was a seat in the cabinet and
the portfolio of Prussian Minister of the Interior. While outwardly Goring continued
to use his stout joviality to increase his popularity, he showed from day to day
the most brutal energy in seizing power, blustering, terrorizing, crushing opposition,
and creating order in accordance with his own ideas. His was the task of ruthlessly
applying force, and hence that part in the National Socialist revolution which
was concealed, with a profusion of words and gestures, behind bustling pseudo-legalities
and Hitler's protestations that this was “the most bloodless revolution in
world history.”
Wherever his moderating
influence might have been executed, Goring failed and increasingly left the
field to the more radical Goebbels. He proved his aggressive brutality once
again when, at the conclusion of the seizure of power, he appeared as an
ambitious principal in the Rohm affair. Together with Heinrich Himmler he took control
of the murders in North Germany and Berlin and, on his own admission, expanded
the “circle of duties” entrusted to him in order, as he thought, finally to ensure
for himself that position as Second Man blocked for so long by Rohm. There is a
revealing story that shows the sort of reputation he had at that time. It
happened shortly after 30 June 1934. Goring arrived late for dinner with the
British Ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, explaining that he had only just got back
from shooting. Sir Eric replied: “Animals, I hope.”
One of the “giants of
jurisdiction” of the Third Reich, he performed or assumed in the first two
years alone the duties of President of the Reichstag as well as of Reich Minister
for Aviation; he was Prussian Minister of the Interior, head of the Gestapo, President
of the Prussian State Council, Reich Forestry Commissioner and Controller of
the Hunt, Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe and Commissioner for the Four-Year
Plan. Yet in each of these positions, which formally gave him enormous power, he
was soon interested only in the decorative side. After a few fitful efforts at
the beginning he generally left his duties to their own devices, with the result
that there was “paralyzing disorder.” What had been intended as a concentration
of forces turned out the exact opposite, and his hunger for office began to
look like nothing more than an eccentric extension of his mania for collecting.
He yielded himself ever more extravagantly to the enjoyment of power, which he
understood mainly as a source of wealth; he organized feasts, state hunts and birthday
celebrations of almost oriental splendor. . . .
His first press officer
at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior has recalled that Goring quickly began
to hate the irksome routine of the ministry and rarely turned up there. A
biography published in 1938 by one of his closest colleagues nonchalantly lists
the tailor, barber, art dealer and jeweler (in that order) as Goring’s first visitors
in the morning of a working day. With a love of luxury like that of some
voluptuous courtesan, he was always changing his suits and uniforms - as often
as five times in a day.
What he was looking for
now was not power but theatrical effect. As a result the areas of his influence
were eroded away: the Prussian position, control of the police, and later also
the authority which he tried to build up for himself over the economy and the
Wehrmacht. In comparison with Hitler, his well-fed joviality did have the advantage
of drawing attention away from the gloomy and neurasthenic obsessiveness of his
partner in the leadership, and his popularity, which was at its peak shortly before
the war, owed much to his weaknesses, behind which people imagined they could
sense human warmth. In a last acknowledgement of this popularity, which no longer
represented his real influence, Hitler appointed him on 1 September 1939 his first
successor and later President of the Reich Defense Council as well as Reich Marshal.
By the end of 1942 he
found himself in a position of complete isolation and had lost to the steadily
advancing Bormann such territory as had been left to him by his rivals Goebbels,
Himmler and Speer.
When General Galland
informed him in 1943 that enemy fighters were accompanying the bomber squadrons
further and further into German territory, Goring forbade him to report the
matter. He rarely took any part now in strategic or other conferences and was
often sought in vain when his chief of staff required instructions. Instead he devoted
himself as before to his pastimes and private passions. The Essen Gauleiter Terboven
tells of a visit to Karinhall: “It was Sunday and the sky over Germany was once
more black with American bombers.” Goring merely made sure from his duty adjutant
that there was no air-raid warning in force for Karinhall and then remarked, “Fine,
let's go hunting.” In the final phase of
his life he suffered from profound illusion. In April 1945 he had been
dismissed with ignominy from all his posts, arrested, and bequeathed a curse.
But when he heard of Hitler's death, he was, his wife recalled, “close to
despair” and exclaimed, “He's dead, Emmy. Now I shall never be able to tell him
that I was true to him till the end!” In much the same way as Himmler, he hoped
to be accepted by the Allies as a partner in negotiations. As General Bodenschatz
has testified, soon after his capture by the Americans his main concern was the
proclamation which he intended to make to the German people as soon as he had reached
a satisfactory agreement with Eisenhower.
His claim to the
leadership of the Reich after Hitler’s death was indisputable in his view. All his utterances in the Nuremberg cell were
pervaded, in a final act of illusory self over-evaluation, by the idea that he
would one day be celebrated as a martyr. He was glad he had been condemned to
death, he stated shortly before the end, because the man condemned to life
imprisonment had no chance of becoming a martyr. “In fifty or sixty years there
will be statues of Hermann Goring all over Germany,” he remarked, and added,
“Little statues maybe, but one in every German home.”
JOSEPH
GOEBBELS: ‘MAN THE BEAST’
The majority of the
ideological elements absorbed into National Socialism were nothing but
material, assessed at varying degrees of effectiveness, for a ceaseless
pyrotechnical display of propagandist agitation. Flags, Sieg Heils, fanfares,
marching columns, banners and domes of searchlights - the whole arsenal of
stimulants, developed with inventive ingenuity, for exciting public ecstasy was
ultimately intended to bring about the individual's self-annulment, a permanent
state of mindlessness, with the aim of rendering first the party adherents and later
a whole nation totally am enable to the leaders' claim to power. . . . This
flight into the irrational, into regions where politics became a matter of
faith, of Weltanschauung, answered a vehement need of the disoriented masses;
nevertheless, there was a purposeful Machiavellian guidance behind the
direction and forms it took, so that on closer inspection the apparently
elemental demand proves to be the planned and repeatedly reawakened
irrationalism to which the modern totalitarian social religions owe their
support and their existence.
Joseph Goebbels was the
brain behind this manipulation of minds, “the only really interesting man in
the Third Reich besides Hitler.” One of the most astonishingly gifted
propagandists of modern times, he stood head and shoulders above the bizarre mediocrity
of the rest of the regime’s top-ranking functionaries.
Goebbels described his
feelings for the Fuhrer as “holy and untouchable.” He stated after a speech by Hitler
that he had spoken “profoundly and mystically, almost like a gospel,” and
affirmed in a protestation of loyalty: “An hour may come when the mob rages
around and roars, ‘Crucify him!’ Then we shall stand as firm as iron and shout and
sing ‘Hosanna!’” In one of his regular birthday addresses on the eve of 20
April, Goebbels declared, “When the Fuhrer speaks it is like a divine service.”
That the son of a strictly Catholic
working-class family from Rheydt in the Rhineland should have found his
ostensible certitude of faith, after years of agonizing indecision, in the National
Socialist movement is a stroke of historical irony. Highly gifted, he was subjected
from an early age to a tormenting feeling of physical inadequacy; he had a weak
constitution and a crippled foot. When he appeared in Geneva in 1933 as
representative of the Reich, a caricature in a Swiss newspaper showed a
crippled little man with black hair. Under it was written: “Who is that? Oh, that's
the representative of the tall, healthy, fair-haired, and blue-eyed Nordic
race!”
He found Hitler’s talk
on Bolshevism, foreign policy, redemption of the rights and holdings of the
princes and private property ‘terrible’ and spoke of “one of the greatest
disappointments of my life”; but when Hitler publicly embraced him shortly after
a speech, Goebbels called him in gratitude ‘a genius’ and noted emotionally in his
diary: “Adolf Hitler, I love you.” Six months earlier he had asked himself who
this man really was. “Christ or St John?” Now, notably under the influence of a
generous invitation to Munich and Berchtesgarden, his last doubts vanished, while
simultaneously his ambition recognized the outlines of the role he might play.
If Hitler was really ‘Christ,’ then he wanted to be the one to take the part of
the prophet; for “the greater and more towering I make God, the greater and
more towering I make myself.” In this sense it really was apt when he wrote
that the days in Munich with Hitler had shown him his ‘direction and path’: the
organizer of the Fuhrer myth had found his mission. During his stay, he wrote
in his diary: “The chief talks about
race problems. It is impossible to reproduce what he said. It must be
experienced. He is a genius. The natural, creative instrument of a fate determined
by God. I am deeply moved. He is like a child: kind, good, merciful. Like a
cat: cunning. clever, agile. Like a lion: roaring and gigantic. A fellow, a
man. He talks about the state. In the afternoon about winning over the state
and the political revolution. It sounds like prophecy. Up in the skies a white
cloud takes on the shape of the swastika. There is a blinking light that cannot
be a star. A sign of fate?”
From this point on he
submitted himself, his whole existence, to his attachment to the person of the
‘Fuhrer,’ consciously eliminating all inhibitions springing from intellect, free
will and self-respect.
“To unleash volcanic
passions, outbreaks of rage, to use masses of people on the march, to organize
hatred and despair with ice-cold calculation”: this was how he [Goebbels] saw
his self-imposed task. And he succeeded. With diabolical flair, continually
thinking up new tricks, he drove his listeners into ecstasy, made them stand up,
sing songs, raise their arms, repeat oaths - and he did it, not through the
passionate inspiration of the moment, but as the result of sober psychological
calculation at the desk. Once he had got the reaction he wanted he stood there,
small but erect, generally with one hand on his hip, above the tumult, coolly
assessing the effect of his stage management. In truth, the ‘little doctor’
with the tormenting feeling of physical inadequacy was capable of bending the masses
to his will and making them available for any purpose; he could, as he boasted,
play upon the national psyche ‘as on a piano.’
Immediately after 30
January 1933 he boasted that his propaganda had not only operated directly by
winning over millions of supporters; equally important was its effect in paralyzing
opponents. Many had become so tired, so fearful, so inwardly despairing as a
result of his onslaughts that in the end they regarded Hitler’s Chancellorship
as fated. His reward came in the middle of March 1933 when Hitler openly broke
the coalition agreement to bestow upon him the long-planned Ministry for
National Enlightenment and Propaganda. On taking office Goebbels cheerfully announced
that “the government intends no longer to leave the people to their own devices.”
It was the task of the new ministry “to establish political coordination between
people and government.” . . .
The very essence of
totalitarian government always lies in the combination of propaganda and
terrorism. It is these two together that alone make possible that thoroughgoing
psychological and social organization of man which reduces the scope of
individual freedom to the point of immobility.
Everything seems to
indicate that in Goebbels’s anti-Semitism, over and above individual motives,
we must see an example of that dialectic common to all totalitarian propaganda:
the need for a barbarically exaggerated image of the opponent. This helps to
harness the aggressions within a society while attaching the latent positive
energies to emotional idealizations of its own leader figures. Only in this way
could propaganda regain that vehemence which had once brought it such success,
even if there was always an obvious element of strained artificiality about the
demonized figure of the Jew as presented by Goebbels with ever more breathless efforts.
All his attempts to paint the universal enemy as a wirepuller at work from Moscow
to Wall Street were shattered by the reality of the frightened and harassed human
beings wearing the yellow star, who for a time wandered the streets of German cities
before suddenly vanishing forever.
The astonishing effect
of his ideas once more confirmed Hitler’s assertion “that by the clever and
continuous use of propaganda a people can even be made to mistake heaven for
hell, and vice versa, the most miserable life for Paradise.” Preoccupied as he
was with propaganda, it was, as one of his colleagues confirmed, “almost a
happy day” for him when famous buildings were destroyed in an air raid, because
at such times he put into his appeals that ecstatic hatred which aroused the
fanaticism of the tiring workers and spurred them to fresh efforts.
Unhesitatingly he
accepted Hitler’s end as his own. Unlike the former comrades in arms who
ignominiously fled - Ley, Ribbentrop, Streicher - but also without the naïve self-deception
of Goring or Himmler, he had no illusions as to how intensely they had provoked
the world. “As for us,” he wrote in Das Reich of 14 November 1943, “we have
burnt our bridges. We cannot go back, but neither do we want to go back. We are
forced to extremes and therefore resolved to proceed to extremes.” And later:
“We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the
greatest criminals.” He was level-headed enough to accept responsibility for
the final verdict. . His remarks in his farewell conversation with Hans
Fritzsche, in which, following Hitler’s example, he ascribed the collapse to
the failure of the German people, and at the same time the way he strove to
intensify the process of destruction, were like a final seal set upon his
contempt for humanity. “When we depart, let the earth tremble!” were the last
words with which, on 21 April 1945, he dismissed his associates. What he seemed
to fear more than anything else was a death devoid of dramatic effects; to the
end, he was what he had always been: the propagandist for himself. Whatever he
thought or did was always based solely on this one agonizing wish for
self-exultation, and this same object was served by the murder of his children,
on the evening of 1 May 1945. They were the last victims of an egomania extending
beyond the grave. However, this deed too failed to make him the figure of tragic
destiny he had hoped to become; it merely gave his end a touch of repulsive irony.
A few hours later he died, together with his wife, in the gardens of the Reich Chancellery.
REINHARD
HEYDRICH: THE SUCCESSOR
He was a man like a
whiplash. In his Luciferian coldness, amorality and insatiable greed for power
he was comparable only to the great criminals of the Renaissance, with whom he shared
a conscious awareness of the omnipotence of man. In his case this took the form
of the conviction that by the methodical application of technology and
organization everything was possible: the construction of a government, the
establishment of an empire, the re-creation of a race, the purification of
blood over wide areas. And he intended these means to be directed to one simple
end: power. . . .
He seemed the epitome
not merely of National Socialist totalitarianism but of modern totalitarianism
as a whole; and if he left the world a legacy before he had come fully into his
own, it was that he taught man to fear man more comprehensively than ever before.
The traditional idea of evil, which is linked with the concept of possession by
spirits, uncontrollable outbursts of emotion, and an attachment to the dark
instincts, breaks down before the transparent sobriety of this type. So does
the concept of the demonic, which has metaphysical overtones inappropriate to
the unwaveringly realistic conception of power of this totally secularized
phenomenon. Heydrich was tall, blond, athletic,
and combined high intelligence with a metallic streak in his nature which was
regarded as the proof of a special racial grace. “A young, evil god of death,”
as Carl Jacob Burckhardt said after meeting him, he was sometimes called by his
subordinates, with a mixture of fear and admiration, “the Blond Beast,” while
Das Schwarze Korps wrote of him: “Even in his outward appearance he was an SS
man as the people picture him, a man all of one piece.” The coldness and
contempt with which he viewed human beings and human life may give us a hint of
the way in which, during hours of solitary self-confrontation, he treated
himself. Only alcohol and the pleasures of night life enjoyed with forced intemperance
- outings on which he ordered his subordinates by turn to accompany him - could
bring him brief respite from a life in which he was constantly being tested to
breaking-point. . . .
One of his colleagues
has described the haunting and profoundly revealing occasion when Heydrich came
home at night to his brilliantly lit apartment and suddenly saw his reflection
in a large wall mirror. In an attack of cold rage he “whipped his pistol from
his holster and fired two shots at this double,” the ever and tormentingly
present negation of himself, from which he could free himself in liquor and in
the splintered glass, but not in reality. He was the prisoner of this figure of
negation, he lived in a world populated by the self-created chimeras of a hostile
distrust, scented behind everything treachery, intrigue or the snares of hidden
enmity, and thought only in terms of dependence - the most impressive embodiment
of that vulgarized Darwinist principle in whose light the world was revealed to
National Socialist ideology: life seen exclusively as struggle. Himmler said of
him that he was “the embodiment of distrust - the ‘hyper suspicious,’ as people
called him - nobody could endure it for long.” As no one else among his colleagues and
rivals, he was a master of indirect methods of gaining influence, of bringing
about the almost imperceptible shifting of power which only became visible at
the moment of the rival’s downfall. With the exception of Bormann, who thanks
to his personal position of trust with Hitler felt unassailable, everyone
feared him, however high above him they might stand in the official hierarchy,
and they watched his apparently inexorable rise with a mixture of fascination
and impotence, like an approaching doom.
Heydrich clearly saw
that in a modern totalitarian system of government there is no limit to the
principle of state security, so that anyone in charge of it is bound to acquire
almost unrestricted power. Within a year, always in agreement with Himmler, he
gained control first of the Munich police, then of the Bavarian, and in turn of
each of the political police of the German Lunder. The last was Prussia, whose
chief, Rudolf Diels, was astute enough and had enough friends in high places to
resist until 20 April 1934; then he and Goring had to yield. Heydrich himself
became head of the Secret Police (Gestapo) as well as of the SD, and in 1936,
when Himmler became Chief of the German Police, Heydrich was also given control
of the Criminal Police. He was then, at thirty-two, one of the most powerful
men in the country. After Heydrich had given such an impressive demonstration
of his cunning and adroitness in the elimination of Rohm and the destruction of
the power of the SA, he became almost indispensable wherever any dirty business
had to be arranged. He had a hand in the Tukhachevsky affair, which led to the liquidation
of the top military leaders of the Soviet Union, and in the dismissal of the
traditionalist Army leaders Blomberg and Fritsch following fabricated
scandalous ‘revelations.’ His work behind the scenes helped to prepare the way
for the Austrian Anschluss and the piecemeal incorporation of Czechoslovakia.
In some way that is still obscure he was behind the attempt on Hitler’s life in
the Munich Burgerbrau; he organized the nation-wide anti- Semitic demonstration
that came to be known as the ‘Crystal Night,’ conceived and staged the ‘attack’
on the German radio station at Gleiwitz which was to provide a pretext for declaring
war on Poland, and finally was the initiator of Project Bernhard, the attempt
to undermine the British currency by means of forged Bank of England notes.
He probably received
with somewhat divided feelings the order for the so-called Final Solution of
the Jewish Problem, which was given to him on 24 January 1939 (and, with the
further order to supervise the “zone of German influence in Europe,” again on
31 July 1941). True, he never shrank from any task, and to this he immediately devoted
himself with that tendency to perfectionist, large-scale solutions and the apocalyptic
thoroughness typical of the organizational thinking of National Socialist officialdom.
But cunning was more in his line than brutality, and for an opponent to step
unsuspectingly into an artistically constructed trap gave him a satisfaction he
never derived from any aggressively brutal act. . . These scruples found no
outward expression, however, and with an inflexibility that gave no hint of
inner conflict, Heydrich set about seizing and herding together the Jews of
Europe and sending them to their death, partly by ‘natural reduction,’ that is to
say by hunger, exhaustion, or disease, and partly by physical destruction,
either with the aid of murder squads or by the so-called ‘special treatment’ of
mass gassing.
He conceived the
overall plan which, over and above extermination of the Jewish race, was to
make vast areas of the East available as ‘experimental fields’ for eugenic breeding.
The attack which cost
him his life was planned and prepared by Czechoslovak exiles in London, who had
noted the success of Heydrich’s pacification measures with growing disquiet;
not the least of their purposes in ordering the assassination was to provoke
the regime into taking such brutal counter-measures that a more widespread resistance
would be sparked off. The three young men who waited for Heydrich’s car near
the city boundary on 27 May 1942 had been dropped by parachute shortly before not
far from Prague. As the car slowed down to take a sharp bend one of them, Jan Kubis,
threw a bomb which exploded under the vehicle. Heydrich was seriously wounded.
He managed to jump out of the car and fire a few shots at his fleeing assailants,
but then collapsed. Doctors were sent by Hitler and Himmler, but he died a week
later.
In the punitive
measures that followed no fewer than 936 people were condemned to death by
court-martial at Prague and 395 at Brno. Although no connection was established
between them and the assassination, all the inhabitants of the village of Lidice
were sacrificed to the manes of Reinhard Heydrich. And as if to make the terror
emanating from his name live after his death, the circumstances of his death provided
the final impetus for the experiments with sulphonamides on human beings at
Ravensbruck concentration camp. Operation Reinhard, by which the property of murdered
Jews was sequestered, was named after him. Heydrich was far more than a leading
henchman of Hitler remarkable for intelligence and extremism. He was a symbol
and perhaps the representative figure of the Third Reich at the peak of its
internal and external power. In this sense it was entirely apt when in the inner
circle he was spoken of as Hitler’s successor, who “sooner or later” would have
become Germany’s ‘Fuhrer.’ He had already entered into this succession in the
background through his place in the growing SS state which was mercilessly asserting
itself.
HEINRICH
HIMMLER: PETTY BOURGEOIS AND GRAND INQUISITOR
Widely identified with
the SS state and the extermination factories,
Heinrich Himmler seems like the civilized, or at least contemporary,
reincarnation of a mythical monster. The feeling of
menace, of omnipresent yet intangible terror, which once emanated
from him has become attached to his name and to his personality,
which is all the more sinister for its lack of personal
color. Even in his lifetime there was a Himmler ‘myth,’ which distorted the
features of the Reichsfuhrer of the SS in a way that
made him all the more terrifying and turned into an abstract
principle the man who was unrecognizable as a human being. Entirely in this sense Himmler said of himself that he would be “a
merciless sword of justice.” The methods of
his terrorism, based upon modern principles of organization, and the rationalized, ‘industrial’ extermination processes which he
employed, the whole businesslike practicality of his fanaticism, have curiously
intensified the aura of terror surrounding his
person, beyond all actual experience. In
the light of the million fold terrors he inspired, there was a temptation to
search for ‘abysses’ in which at least a pale gleam
of some ‘human’ reaction might be visible, and it was that that
misled people. In reality Heinrich Himmler was exactly what his appearance suggested: an insecure, vacillating character,
the color of whose personality was
grey. His lack of independence was concealed by a desperate and stupid overzealousness. What looked like a malignity or
brutality was merely the conscienceless
efficiency of a man whose life substance was so thinly spread that he had to borrow from outside. No emotion either carried him
away or inhibited him; “His very
coldness was a negative element, not glacial, but bloodless.” A capable organizer and administrator, he possessed that inhuman
mixture of diligence, subservience and
fanatical will to carry things through that casts aside humane considerations as irrelevant, and whose secret idols are
closed files of reports of tasks completed; a man
at freezing point.
It is only in a
hopelessly disrupted society that a figure like Heinrich Himmler can acquire
political influence; and only under a totalitarian form of government offering
universal salvation could he come to hold the power that offered some prospect
of putting his ideas into practice. His sobriety and apparent common sense, which
deceived outsiders, were precisely what made his career possible. “I am
convinced that nobody I met in Germany is more normal,” an English observer
wrote in 1929. The basic pathological characteristic of the National Socialist
movement, so often and so erroneously sought in clinically obvious psychopaths
like Julius Streicher, showed itself rather in the curious amalgam of
crankiness and ‘normality,’ of insanity and sober administrative ability. Thus Streicher
was pushed further and further to the sidelines, while Heinrich Himmler, who
possessed the arcanum imperii of this system of government, quickly reached the
highest power, a calculating man of faith who without doubt or challenge trampled
over millions, leaving behind him a trail of blood and tears, the most dreadful
combination of crackpot and manipulator of power, of quack and inquisitor, that
history has ever known. Concentration camps and herb gardens, such as he had planted
at Dachau and elsewhere: these are still the most apt symbols of his personality.
On 6 January 1929
Himmler, at the same time running a chicken farm at Waldtrudering near Munich,
was appointed head of the then barely three-hundred man- strong SS. He proved
his abilities as an organizer by expanding the force to over 50,000 men by
1933. . . . When on 17 June 1936 Himmler was finally appointed head of the now
unified police forces of the Reich and confirmed as Reichsfuhrer of the SS, he
seemed to have reached the peak of an astounding career. He now controlled a
substantial portion of the real power and also, thanks to the terror that he
spread, an even greater part of the psychological power. Himmler's comprehensive and unitary
organization provided the totalitarian government with the systematic control
that now enabled it to operate to its fullest extent. No sooner had Himmler, in
the course of capturing power, seized control of the police than a perceptible
tightening of the regime could be felt.
It was entirely
consistent that the moral status of the SS rose with the number of its victims.
As Himmler declared to the officer corps of the ‘Adolf Hitler’ SS Bodyguard on
7 September 1940: “Exactly the same thing happened at forty degrees below zero
in Poland when we had to carry off thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds
of thousands, when we had to be so hard - as to shoot thousands of leading
Poles. When we had to be so hard, because otherwise vengeance would have fallen
upon us later. It is a great deal easier in many cases to go with a company
into battle than to operate with a company in some region suppressing a
rebellious population at a low level of culture, carrying out executions,
transporting people away, taking away howling and weeping women.”
However, it was not
merely the ethos of hardness that gave such utterances by Himmler their
decisive twist, but rather the vulgar and calculating pride in his own capacity
for inhumanity with which the pedant and the former model pupil of the King
Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich sought to establish his leadership among his murder-and-battle-hardened
subordinates.
The human experiments
in the laboratories of the concentration camps, which displayed a horrifying
amateurism, yielded not the slightest useful result because their real purpose
was merely to act as a blind; in the words of one of the doctors involved, Himmler
wanted to prove “that he was not a murderer but a patron of science.” Any remaining
feelings of guilt were removed by the assertion, delivered with the pseudo tragic
pose of provincial demonism, that it was “the curse of the great to have to
walk over corpses.” Behind this, conjured up more zealously than ever, lay that
concept of a Greater German post-war empire which, beyond the extermination
which he carried out with routine conscientiousness, he was planning and
preparing. He greeted the representative
of the World Jewish Congress, who came to see him on 21 April 1945, with the
unbelievable words: “Welcome to Germany, Herr Masur. It is time you Jews and we
National Socialists buried the hatchet.” He indulged in speculation upon what
he would do as soon as he came to power, and seriously hoped, up to the day of
his arrest, that the Western allies would greet him as a partner in negotiations
and even as an ally against Soviet Russia.
During these weeks of
the collapse of the Third Reich the SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler was an
opportunist fighting stubbornly to delay the end. In vain did those around him
press him to declare himself and assume responsibility for the SS. On 19 March
he was still conjuring up apocalyptic visions of a last-ditch stand to the last
man “like the Ostrogoths on Vesuvius”; now he thought only of disguise and
flight. “One thing can never be forgiven among us Germans: that is treachery,”
he had assured his followers a few months earlier. No small number of the SS,
especially members of the elite groups, committed suicide when they realized
Heinrich Himmler’s treachery.
MARTIN
BORMANN: THE BROWN EMINENCE
From too great a
distance, as from too close, a totalitarian system of government looks like a
single tightly knit block whose massive structure towers over society, as vast
as it is impenetrable. However, this impression, based upon the determination
and the merciless energy with which such governments achieve their purposes, is
an illusion.
When Hitler appointed
him executor of his will, Bormann attained his ultimate ambition of complete
identification with the central will of the National Socialist power structure.
Sober, calculating and coldly diligent, he had always sought power alone, never
its insignia. The latter seemed to him mere foolishness and evidence of
misdirected cupidity that clung to externals.
Almost unnoticed, with
his characteristic silent persistence, he had risen step by step within a short
time. He was never called more than ‘Director of the Party Chancellery’ and
‘the Fuhrer’s secretary’, and yet during the declining years of the Hitler
regime no one was more powerful.
No one was more hated.
The contempt aroused by the Neronic pomposity of Goring, Ribbentrop’s absurdity,
or even Himmler’s bloodthirsty reputation, all the mutual antipathies that
built up within the top leadership through years of rivalry, were of a different
kind and not to be compared with the intensity of the bitterness his countless enemies
felt towards this Machiavelli of the office desk. Hans Frank, who called him an
‘arch-scoundrel’, remarked that the word ‘hate’ was “far too weak”, and even
his personal colleagues and secretaries - who in every other case, without
exception, could find a good word for their superior - expressed only aversion
[toward Bormann] at Nuremburg.
Within the
smooth-functioning mechanism of his bureaucratic apparatus, man was the only
element not entirely calculable, a latent deviation, the element of an
unreliability that he knew he alone did not share. According to the available
evidence he did not smoke, did not drink, ate with moderation, and possessed no
inclination of his own, no interests, no hobbies, but probably there was here,
not a consciously austere attitude of renunciation, but merely the puritanism
of an impersonality that was without needs because it knew no needs. His peculiar
advantages derived from just this lack of personality-forming factors. He was
eager to serve, unobtrusive, down to earth, and even his enemies have always
stressed his unparalleled diligence.
Through his supervision
of the lists of Hitler’s visitors he kept a suspicious watch over the Fuhrer's
contacts with the outside world and, in the words of an observer, “erected a
positive Chinese wall through which people were admitted only after showing
their empty hands and explaining in detail to Bormann the purpose of their visit.
By this means he had absolute control over the whole machinery of the Reich.”
Towards the end of the
war Hitler positively thanked him for, in effect, closing the doors more and
more tightly against everyone who tried to bring the cold air of reality into
the musty world of insane delusions and fantasies that prevailed in the
Fuhrer’s headquarters. His intimate knowledge of Hitler’s weaknesses and
personal peculiarities gave him an advantage over all his rivals. Even
Goebbels, when early in 1945 he sent an album of photographs of ploughed-up
streets and shattered architectural monuments to the Fuhrer’s headquarters,
received it back from Bormann with the comment that the Fuhrer did not want to
be bothered “with such trivial matters.”
His directives on
policy towards the churches refer repeatedly to “diminution of power,”
“possibilities of exercising influence,” and the “right to lead the people”;
and when, in his famous order to the Gauleiters of 6-7 June 1941 on the
“relations between National Socialism and Christianity,” he tried with dreary
impertinence to place an ideological cloak around ideas relating purely to the
acquisition of power, he could not avoid eventually revealing the true cause of
this hostility: “National Socialist and Christian conceptions are incompatible.
The Christian churches build upon men’s ignorance; by contrast National
Socialism] rests upon scientific foundations. When we [National Socialists]
speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their
spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the
universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless
planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God.
The assertion that this
universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being,
every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or
other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon
shameless professional self-interest.”
Only then does Bormann
pass over to arguments based upon the crucial considerations of power. Since
Adolf Hitler himself has the leadership of the people in his hands:
“All influences which
might restrict or even damage the leadership of the people exercised by the
Fuhrer with the aid of the NSDAP must be eliminated. The people must be
increasingly wrested from the churches and their instruments the priests. Naturally
the churches, looking at matters from their point of view, will and must resist
this diminution of power. But never again must the churches be allowed any influence
over the leadership of the people. This must be broken totally and forever.
Only then will the
existence of nation and Reich be assured." It was his declared intention largely to crush
the churches even while the war was in progress. In 1941, when he found himself
in tactical opposition on this point to Hitler, who considered such a clash
inopportune in view of the stains and stresses of the war, he continued to
pursue his plans in secret; for the war seemed to him a suitable opportunity,
which would never recur, for carrying the regime's ideological aims to their
logical conclusion. Here as always Bormann was resolved to go to extremes, the “advocate
of all harsh measures”, as he has been called.
In a memorandum of 19
August 1942 he wrote: “The Slavs are to
work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Slav fertility is
undesirable. They may possess contraceptives or abort, the more the better. Education
is dangerous. We shall leave them religion as a means of diversion. They will
receive only the absolutely necessary provisions. We are the masters, we come first.”
He signed Hitler’s
political testament, acted as witness to his marriage, and stood in the
courtyard of the Reich Chancellery, along with Goebbels, General Burgdorf and a
few others, under the fire of Russian shells as Hitler’s corpse went up in
flames. . . . Since then he has vanished. Between the Weidendammer Brucke and
the Lehrter Station all trace of him was lost behind fountains of dust and
crashing walls in that anonymity which he always sought.
ERNST ROHM AND
THE LOST GENERATION
Once power had been achieved
the ambitions of the SA for independence previously smouldering more or less underground,
strove for open expression. Hitler solved the structural problem of the ‘double
party’ with bloodshed. On 30 June 1934 and the following two days he arranged
the liquidation of his old follower and friend Ernst Rohm, together with the
homosexual element within the SA that had lent not merely the brown terrorist
army but the whole of Hitler’s movement some of its most striking and repellent
features.
Death before the firing
squad against the walls of Stadelheim prison and the Lichterfeld Military
College meant for most of the high SA leaders, from Ernst Rohm through Edmund
Heines down to August Schneidhuber, the identical conclusion to identical careers.
Service as an officer in the war and in the Freikorps or the right-radical defense
associations had in most cases been followed by half-hearted attempts to get a
foothold in civilian life, as a traveler, commercial employee, estate manager
or simply head of household. At intervals they cultivated the old contacts;
there was a deeply ingrained longing for male companionship, for the trade of
arms, for the unconstrainedness of the soldier’s life, and finally, for
unrestrained indulgence in eating and drinking. These men were merely
hibernating behind a bourgeois facade which they felt to be alien and ‘civilian’;
meanwhile they conspired, joined in enterprises that amounted to high treason,
in the assassination of Republican politicians, in vehmic murders. Rohm was a fanatical soldier and officer,
though without the arrogance and strained intensity that put a touch of martial
demonism into the blank face of the General Staff officer of the old school.
Although from childhood he had had “only one thought and wish, to be a
soldier”, and towards the end of the war was actually on the General Staff and
a magnificent organizer, he was much closer to the type of the field officer.
He was a daredevil who
had come out of the war with numerous wounds and even in his memoirs he
expressed a curiously exalted aversion for the word ‘prudent’ (besonnen). He divided men simply into soldiers
and civilians, into friend and enemy, was honest and without guile, coarse,
sober, a simple-minded and straightforward swashbuckler who liked “the noise of
the camp and of the quartermaster's stores.” Wherever he appeared, one of his
comrades of the period of illegal military activity noted, “life came into the
place, but above all practical work was done.” His robustly practical Bavarian
mind, to which all brooding was alien, had no time for profound cults, for
emotional enthusiasm for the Nordic ideal, or insane race fantasies, and he openly
mocked the complex philosophical mysticism of Rosenberg, Himmler and Darre. . .
.
At the same time, Rohm
was a brutal boss, who gathered around him a dissolute crew who did not shrink
from a bad reputation and actually prided themselves on their corruption,
perverse debauchery and crimes of violence. From 1923 onwards Rohm succeeded more and more
openly in imposing his ideas, so that the NSDAP visibly developed into a
‘double party’ made up of two rival blocs: the SA, or Storm Troops, as Hitler
had christened them after a beerhall battle that became a party legend; and the
Political Organization, abbreviated to PO and contemptuously dubbed ‘P-Zero’ by
the SA. Hitler at this period was little more than an expert speaker recruiting
for a movement whose true core was the paramilitary organization led by Rohm,
and if everything indicates that the leader of the NSDAP was at this time
content with such a distribution of roles, subsequent events proved that it had
its effect on his desire for self-assertion. At the latest after the
unsuccessful enterprise of 9 November 1923, which saw Hitler on his knees
before the authority of the state on the steps of the Felderrnhalle, he
realized that Rohm’s crude idea of a head-on conquest of power was hopeless and
that consequently the building up of a great military party organization was
fundamentally wrong. Whereas Rohm, released on probation immediately after the
trial, at once tried to reassemble the shattered nationalist armed
organizations, Hitler, even while still in Landsberg prison, began to dissociate
himself from Rohm, to drop the military presuppositions of his plans for seizing
power, and, as he proudly stressed later, remained “immune to advice.”
Various half-hearted
attempts by both sides to reach an understanding came to nothing, so that soon
after his release Hitler brought about the break that robbed Rohm of all
further opportunities for activity.
Shortly after the
NSDAP’s great electoral victory of 14 September, [1930] Hitler therefore
recalled Ernst Rohm from Bolivia, though not without first himself assuming the
post of Supreme Leader of the SA and demanding from every SA leader “an oath of
unconditional allegiance” to his person, as an assurance against future
insubordination. Rohm immediately obeyed the call, and the passion with which he
devoted himself to his new task as Chief of Staff of the SA seemed to contain
some conviction that, in spite of all contrary assurances, his former conception
of the paramilitary organization and of direct action for the seizure of the
state had gained ground. . . .
Nine months after Rohm
had taken up his duties, the SA already numbered 170,000 men. He brought with
him the whole notorious company of his friends, whose entry finally ensured the
dominance of the criminal element within the SA. This left no more room for the
selfless devotion to the cause, which had in any case been only a faint and
fitful impulse. Rohm, it soon came to be said, was building up a “private army
within the private army,” while Hitler rejected reports of criminal activities within
the top leadership of the SA “utterly and vigorously” as an “impertinence”. . .
. Confident in the knowledge of its ceaselessly swelling numbers, the SA now
became for the first time the instrument of calculated mass terrorism which
Hitler had intended. Battles in meeting halls and in the streets, propaganda
trips, the blowing up of buildings and murder spread paralysis and fear, and
caused a complete breakdown of morale among the Republican forces.
While the SA were
winning the freedom of the streets for Hitler and thus opening his road to
power, the question of what was to happen to its formations after the seizure of
power was becoming ever more urgent. Rohm, his self-confidence immeasurably swollen
by success, now returned more provocatively than ever to the old solution: a duumvirate
with Hitler as political leader and agitator and himself as generalissimo of a
vast armed force in which the whole nation was to be organized. Hitler at first
kept his options open by giving the SA, after 30 January 1933, the most varied
tasks in an unparalleled tangle of tactical directions. Within the framework of
the double revolution from above and below, it was given the role of expressing
the popular anger that could no longer control itself; some of its units were
now permitted, free from all the restrictions of the preceding years, to hunt,
torture and murder and, in the first unsupervised concentration camps, to give
vent to all the sadistic ingenuity of inhibited petty-bourgeois feelings. The
number of murdered within the first nine months of the regime has been
estimated at 500 to 600, the number of those sent to the concentration camps
already announced by Frick on 8 March at about 100,000.
He [Rohm] accused
Hitler of being nothing but “a civilian, an ‘artist,’ a dreamer.” From the
summer of 1933 onwards he demonstratively revived the SA’s old militaristic tendencies
and organized huge parades all over the Reich, voicing his discontent in numerous
critical utterances on foreign policy, anti-Semitism, the destruction of the trade
unions, or the suppression of freedom of expression. He turned bitterly against
Goebbels, Goring, Himmler and Hess and moreover, with his plans for
amalgamating the Reichswehr and the SA into a Nationalist Socialist militia,
antagonized the generals, who were jealous of their privileges. “The grey
rock,” he would say, “must be submerged by the brown flood.”
Thus he gradually
arranged the stage upon which his own fate was to be decided. Undoubtedly no
revolt was in progress when on the morning of 30 June 1934, drowsy and bemused,
he was arrested by Hitler himself.
There died with Ernst
Rohm only those children of the revolution who, like himself, wished to achieve
in a swift assault what Hitler, in his own words, sought “slowly and purposefully,
in tiny steps.” Rohm's conviction, held to the last, that he was in full agreement
with Hitler was entirely correct, as is shown by the evolution of the SS, the true
victor in this bloody story. For its influence, its power, later attained that
all embracing extension which Rohm had planned for his SA. And if his ambitious
lieutenants had dreamt of an SA state, now the SS state became a reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment