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Authors: John Bryden
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about every aspect of German national life. The second and third had the normal police tasks, while the fourth was an organization deliberately designed for abduction, torture, and murder.
The Gestapo’s primary mandate was to arrest and eliminate the “internal enemies” identified by the SD. These typically included politicians, Jews, Freemasons, church leaders, and generally anyone critical of the regime. As time went on, the Gestapo increasingly acted on its own in defining and liquidating “undesirables.” When dealing with German citizens, there was some token deference to an individual’s legal rights, but in the occupied countries, no such rights were recognized.
The SD and the three police services were consolidated under Heydrich at the start of the war as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Head Office. It became a bureaucracy like any other government department, except that its mandate was the wholesale suppression of human rights, and murder.
The functions of the RSHA were grouped into numbered offices. Thus Amt IIIB was engaged in promulgating “public health,” which in Nazi parlance meant compulsory abortions on female slave-labourers, denying education to children in conquered territories, and the “resettlement” of ethnic minorities. Amt IIIC was charged with controlling education and undermining organized religion. It named university professors and manipulated scientific research while promoting neo-pagan festivals and cultural events as alternatives to Christian festivals. Amt IV was the Gestapo, with Amt IVA being responsible for suppressing every form of political dissent, Amt IVB for the persecution of Jews and other minorities, and Amt IVC for the administration of concentration camps. Amt VI collected foreign political intelligence.20
What made all this madness possible was Amt I, the personnel office. It undertook to find the right people for the various departments and tasks: psychopaths and sadists for the Gestapo and for the murder squads of the Einsatzkommandos in Russia, bigots and criminals for Amt III, and others with a wide range of character flaws and emotional defects that could be put to good use bullying their fellow human beings. As one RSHA insider described it, the model Gestapo man was “without any moral scruple, even without any conception of moral values, cunning to the point of brilliance, with sadistic leanings and definite pathological tendencies.”21 It was Amt I’s task to obtain such “raw material.”
At the top of this pyramid of terror was Heydrich, now thirty-five and now with the title “Chief of the Security Police and SD.” He was unusual for an ardent Nazi in that he was an intellectual, cultured, and a gifted musician, playing the violin with skill and sensitivity. Yet with a pen stroke he routinely ordered the deportation, even the murder, of hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals. He was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of European Jews that formally began in 1942. It was as though his mind and his conscience were separated by a pane of frosted glass; what he did not see, he could not feel, and what he could not feel, he did not care about.
There were normal human feelings in Heydrich, however. Canaris quickly befriended him and even bought a house in the same street when he and his family moved to Berlin in 1935. The two families socialized, playing croquet in the afternoons and having dinners together. Heydrich often expressed his suspicion of Canaris to his subordinates, but he could never shake the deference felt by a former cadet for his former commander.22
Canaris was Germany’s spymaster-in-chief. His fundamental business was deceit. He well appreciated the ancient axiom: The most dangerous enemy is he who poses as your friend. He was just such a friend to Heydrich.
Canaris was to use this, and use it well.
Like old wine cellared too long, Britain’s secret
The Gestapo’s primary mandate was to arrest and eliminate the “internal enemies” identified by the SD. These typically included politicians, Jews, Freemasons, church leaders, and generally anyone critical of the regime. As time went on, the Gestapo increasingly acted on its own in defining and liquidating “undesirables.” When dealing with German citizens, there was some token deference to an individual’s legal rights, but in the occupied countries, no such rights were recognized.
The SD and the three police services were consolidated under Heydrich at the start of the war as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Head Office. It became a bureaucracy like any other government department, except that its mandate was the wholesale suppression of human rights, and murder.
The functions of the RSHA were grouped into numbered offices. Thus Amt IIIB was engaged in promulgating “public health,” which in Nazi parlance meant compulsory abortions on female slave-labourers, denying education to children in conquered territories, and the “resettlement” of ethnic minorities. Amt IIIC was charged with controlling education and undermining organized religion. It named university professors and manipulated scientific research while promoting neo-pagan festivals and cultural events as alternatives to Christian festivals. Amt IV was the Gestapo, with Amt IVA being responsible for suppressing every form of political dissent, Amt IVB for the persecution of Jews and other minorities, and Amt IVC for the administration of concentration camps. Amt VI collected foreign political intelligence.20
What made all this madness possible was Amt I, the personnel office. It undertook to find the right people for the various departments and tasks: psychopaths and sadists for the Gestapo and for the murder squads of the Einsatzkommandos in Russia, bigots and criminals for Amt III, and others with a wide range of character flaws and emotional defects that could be put to good use bullying their fellow human beings. As one RSHA insider described it, the model Gestapo man was “without any moral scruple, even without any conception of moral values, cunning to the point of brilliance, with sadistic leanings and definite pathological tendencies.”21 It was Amt I’s task to obtain such “raw material.”
At the top of this pyramid of terror was Heydrich, now thirty-five and now with the title “Chief of the Security Police and SD.” He was unusual for an ardent Nazi in that he was an intellectual, cultured, and a gifted musician, playing the violin with skill and sensitivity. Yet with a pen stroke he routinely ordered the deportation, even the murder, of hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals. He was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of European Jews that formally began in 1942. It was as though his mind and his conscience were separated by a pane of frosted glass; what he did not see, he could not feel, and what he could not feel, he did not care about.
There were normal human feelings in Heydrich, however. Canaris quickly befriended him and even bought a house in the same street when he and his family moved to Berlin in 1935. The two families socialized, playing croquet in the afternoons and having dinners together. Heydrich often expressed his suspicion of Canaris to his subordinates, but he could never shake the deference felt by a former cadet for his former commander.22
Canaris was Germany’s spymaster-in-chief. His fundamental business was deceit. He well appreciated the ancient axiom: The most dangerous enemy is he who poses as your friend. He was just such a friend to Heydrich.
Canaris was to use this, and use it well.
Like old wine cellared too long, Britain’s secret
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