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pit of organized torture and injustice in which their bodies, and sometimes their spirits, were broken by remote inquisitors who knew how to be affable and bland when occasion called for it and how to beat and kick a man until he whimpered for mercy when occasion called for that. But the remote inquisitors, as we have seen, had problems of their own.
    The sorting out of these problems reflected the development of the Gestapo from a small private instrument inGoering’s own war against all comers, from Communists to the S.A., into the dread and comparatively streamlined apparatus, which, partnered by the S.S.
Sicherheitsdienst
, was ready to apply its deep experience to the subjugation of occupied Europe.
    It is clear, however, from the illustrations already given, that there can be no sorting out of those problems. We are dealing with the struggle for power between rival gangs, and there is nothing more tedious and repetitive. There are no records left to speak of, and if records exist in full they would not be worth losing time over. It is enough to establish the nature of the soil which nurtured the Gestapo, and from which it sprang. And it is only by appreciating the utter demoralization of the German police force, a regular body which should have had a proud tradition, but which had not, that we can understand how that arch-gangster and master of iniquity, Reinhard Heydrich, the type of adventurer without a shadow, was able to seize the whole apparatus after barely a year of quiet application to the task, with such effortless ease.
    The members of the regular German police were civil servants, reflecting the moral condition of their country as a whole no less clearly than civil servants everywhere. Diels was given his chance because of the general demoralization. He failed; but after the war he came back, and for some time held office in the Ministry of the Interior of the Bonn Government.

Chapter 6
Confusion as a Fine Art
    It is time to take a wider view, to look beyond the building in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, and to see the burgeoning Gestapo in relation to the administrative pattern as a whole.
    If the reader finds himself muddled by the strange over-lappings and divisions of authority and executive power, he may be assured that he is in good company: the Germans themselves were also muddled. Even at Nuremberg, with its remarkable gathering of forensic talent, the court never succeeded in unraveling the tangle and laying bare the outlines of the hierarchy—for the very good reasonthat no rigid outline ever existed. In the light of accumulated knowledge we can get a clearer picture than was possible at Nuremberg; but it will only be to find that behind the apparently iron front of Teutonic organization there was a sort of willed chaos.
    It will be for each reader to decide for himself to what extent the confusion was deliberate and calculated, to what extent it was spontaneous and involuntary. Be that as it may, the Germans have brought to a high pitch the art of evading responsibility by losing all sense of it in total confusion; and it comes to much the same thing in the end whether the fostering of such confusion is due to calculated cunning or a more generalized intellectual dishonesty. The general impression created is of a system knocked together in an
ad hoc
manner by the members of a ruling caste intent on reinsuring themselves, never content to commit themselves finally to a single course, but forever contriving to hedge and lay off.
    Confusion first arose from the dualism of the German police as such, and was magnified by the equivocal role of Himmler.
    Strictly speaking, until the Nazis completed their centralizing action, there was no German police. Germany was a Federal Republic, and the various States, or
Laender
, as well as a number of important municipalities, ran their own police forces. There was indeed a Reichs Ministry of the Interior (R.M.d.I.), but this had little effective power and