With the rapid growth of the S.S., a more comprehensive form of para-military organization had to be devised. In this Himmler sought the advice of Heydrich who, in addition to his organization of the S.D., became in effect Himmler’s Chief of Staff in the development of the S.S. as a whole, which was spread in units throughout Germany. Officers in certain centres such as Berlin, where Daluege controlled the S.S., acted with complete independence, and paid little or no attention to headquarters in Munich. The S.S. was now subjected to specialist departments for administration, training and discipline; among them was Heydrich’s unit which, while claiming to be the intelligence section, was in fact a highly organized spy-ring with an increasing network of carefully graded agents and informers. A filing system was devised so that every useful detail about the public and private lives of every individual working for or against the Party, whether he was inside or outside it, was recorded, more especially if the information was of such a nature that it could at any time in the future be extracted and used as a weapon against him. The ultimate strength of Himmler and Heydrich came very much to depend on the fear the existence of these files generated once it became known that they were the closely-guarded possession of the S.D. Heydrich modelled his department on what he regarded as the British spy system, which he held to be the most efficient in the world.
The year 1932 was a period of difficulty and dissension for the Party. Hitler’s instinctive sense of caution and self-protection led him to counterbalance the growing powers of his subordinates by creating for them overlapping functions, so that they expended their excess energies in the exercise of mutual distrust, and were to a considerable extent neutralized through their own intrigue. He encouraged the development of the S.S. not only because it provided the movement with a superior, class-conscious force that encouraged former officers and men of the upper class to join its ranks, but also because the rapid increase of its numbers helped to counterbalance the unruly private army of the S.A. This numbered by 1930 some 100,000 men, drawn mostly from the unemployed, and it was giving Hitler considerable trouble at the very time when he needed the support of the right-wing politicians and industrialists.
The ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of the Party were in a state of open dissension, and in September 1930, the month of the elections in which the Party hoped to win many more seats in the Reichstag, the S.A. went so far as to storm the Party offices in Berlin so as to give an open demonstration of their anger when Otto Strasser, the man they regarded as their champion, was dismissed from the Party. He and Stennes were embarrassing Hitler’s attempts to win support from the Right. Only firm action by Hitler had stopped a catastrophe: to placate these unruly men he made himself Commander of the S.A. Exploiting the crisis of the unemployed, the Nazis won a substantial victory at the polls which entitled them to 107 seats in the Reichstag. It was then, in January 1931, that Hitler called on his old supporter Roehm, who had been working as a military instructor in Bolivia, to return to Germany and become Chief of Staff of the S.A. This appointment introduced a new, intrusive figure into the private world of Himmler and Heydrich. Roehm, a professional soldier, able and ambitious, imposed a new discipline on the S.A., of which the S.S. remained a part, while at the same time he entered into the round of political intrigue of which Goring was the principal agent and Goebbels the propagandist. The fact that Roehm was a notorious homosexual was to prove invaluable for Heydrich’s files, but in the meantime it became obvious that Himmler’s position in the Party and his relationship to Hitler and the other leaders must be more clearly worked out.8
Himmler never became a member of Hitler’s more intimate social circle, certainly never in the sense that Goebbels or Goring rivalled each other in entertaining the leader, taking meals with him or accompanying him as confidential adviser on his missions. Hitler never stayed at Himmler’s house in Gmund, though he made occasional brief visits. Himmler, hiding his ambitions under a kind of obsequious devotion to service, accepted a lower level of influence during this crucial period in Hitler’s formidable onslaught on the succession of weak and crumbling governments in the Reichstag. It is true that he had become a Party deputy in the Reichstag in 1930,9 but unlike Goring or Goebbels, he took no prominent part in the acrimonious and violent exchanges which Goring largely engineered in order to bring discredit to the Reichstag as a machine of government. His part in the Reichstag was that of the supporter of policies determined by others, and a revealing glimpse of him has been recorded on the day when Goring, as President of the Reichstag, outmanoeuvred von Papen’s government and secured the dissolution of the Chamber. It was Himmler, resplendent in his black uniform, his pince-nez secure, who hurried from the Reichstag during the recess to fetch Hitler to a conference at Göring’s presidential palace. He beamed, he clicked his heels, he Heil-Hitlered, and he urged the Führer to hurry as they had Papen at a disadvantage.10
A tenuous, but none the less important, link between Himmler and the Führer at this time lay in the financier Wilhelm Keppler, described by Papen at the Nuremberg Trial as ‘a man who was always in Hitler’s entourage’. By 1932 Keppler had become one of Hitler’s closest economic advisers; he had been introduced to Hitler by Himmler, and his gratitude expressed itself later in his financial patronage of Himmler’s racial researches.11 Keppler became one of the principal men responsible for maintaining relations between the Party and a widening circle of industrialists, and it was through him that the notorious meeting between Hitler and Papen took place at the house of the banker Kurt von Schroeder in Cologne, on 4 January 1933, when certain plans to bring down Schleicher’s government were discussed which were to result in Hitler becoming Chancellor at the end of the month. Himmler was a shadowy supporter on the occasion of this meeting, and later assisted in promoting the next stage of the negotiations through a newcomer to the political stage, Joachim von Ribbentrop, at whose villa in Dahlem the uneasy conferences were continued between Hitler and Papen with Keppler and Himmler still present.
Roehm, meanwhile, was taking an arbitrary line with the S.S. in Berlin, which under Daluege still managed to remain independent of Himmler in Munich. Roehm appointed his own director of training for the S.S. in his area, Friedrich Krueger, but on public occasions Roehm and Himmler appeared together in apparent harmony. Himmler was in no position to press openly for power; he was forced to play the part of the subordinate, while at the same time he studied the opportunities which the work of Heydrich and his S.D. agents were so diligently compiling. He was well satisfied with the rapid growth of the S.S. directly under his control, and with the carefully planned organization and training which had been achieved.
A description of the S.S. formations during the period 1933-4 was given before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg by von Eberstein, the man who had introduced Heydrich to Himmler; Eberstein was an ex-officer and civil servant who had joined the S.S. in 1928 and was typical of its aristocratic leanings. ‘Before 1933’, he said at Nuremberg, ‘a great number of aristocrats and members of German princely houses joined the S.S.’12 He mentioned, for example, the Prince von Waldeck, and the Prince von Mecklenburg, and after 1932, the Prince Lippe-Biesterfeld, General Graf von Schulenburg, Archbishop Groeber of Freiburg, the Archbishop of Brunswick and the Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. When Himmler took over in 1929, there had been, according to Eberstein, only about fifty S.S. men in the district of Thuringia, where he was acting for the S.S. in Weimar, but after the seizure of power he had charge of some 15,000 S.S. men in the area covering Saxony and Thuringia. The elegant S.S. uniform attracted recruits and added to their social prestige. As Eberstein said at Nuremberg: