Hoess — another man, like Goebbels and Heydrich, at one time intended for the Catholic priesthood — had been a soldier during the 1914 — 18 war, and later joined the Free Corps.14 He had been involved in a brutal political murder and imprisoned for six years before becoming a Nazi after his release and joining the S.S. This extraordinary man, so dutiful and even intelligently moralizing in his attitude, wrote his memoirs in confinement after the Hitler war and explained in great detail his relations with Himmler. He had belonged to the idealistic agricultural organization called the Artamanen, a nationalist youth movement which was dedicated to the cultivation of the soil and the avoidance of city life. It was through this that he claims he first came to know Himmler, who, in June 1934 at an S.S. review in Stettin, invited him to join the staff in Dachau, where in December he held the rank of corporal in the Death’s Head Guards.
Dachau, Himmler’s experimental concentration camp, was established by an order signed by him as Police President of Munich on 21 March, and authorized by the Catholic supporter of the Nazis, Heinrich Held, the Prime Minister of Bavaria, a few days before his forcible expulsion by the S.A. The order, which appeared in the Munich Neueste Nachrichten on the day it was signed, read:
‘On Wednesday 22 March, the first concentration camp will be opened near Dachau. It will accommodate 5,000 prisoners. Planning on such a scale, we refused to be influenced by any petty objection, since we are convinced this will reassure all those who have regard for the nation and serve their interests.
Dachau, which was situated about twelve miles north-west of Munich, became a permanent centre of sanction by the Nazis against the German people and all those whom Hitler was later to subject. In the first unbridled period of power, the seizure of men and women for interrogation, often under torture, by the S.S. and the S.A. grew out of hand, and by Christmas 1933 Hitler found it necessary to announce an amnesty for 27,000 prisoners. No one now knows how many were in fact freed, and Himmler was later to boast that he succeeded in persuading Hitler to omit any prisoners in Dachau from the amnesty.
The order for protective custody was as brief as the order establishing Dachau; it read: ‘Based on Article I of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State of February 28 1933, you are taken into protective custody in the interest of public security and order. Reason: suspicion of activities inimical to the State.’
Goring was quite open about the reason for establishing the camps: ‘We had to deal ruthlessly with these enemies of the State… Thus the Concentration Camps were created to which we had to send first thousands of functionaries of the Communist and Social Democratic parties.’ Frick was later to define protective custody as ‘a coercive measure of the Secret State Police… in order to counter all aspirations of enemies of the people and the State.’15
Goring’s barbarous vigour was one aspect of Nazi cruelty; Himmler’s attention to the details of brutality was another. Almost twenty years separate us from the full exposure of what happened in the concentration camps, and no documentation could be more complete, ranging from the testimony given by thousands of persecuted men and women who managed to survive, to the detailed witness of such men as Hoess and Eichmann, Himmler’s agents in the most fearful record of torture, destruction and despair that human history has ever compiled in such thorough and horrifying detail. While Goring as a man was no more brutal than many other oppressors in the evolutionary struggle of modern Europe, the coldly punitive administration of sadism by Himmler challenges comprehension. Yet it is necessary to understand him, not least because there will always exist human beings who, once they are given a similar power over others and have similar convictions of superiority, may be tempted to act as he did.
Himmler had learned to live and work by regulations, and on 1 November 1933, the rules governing life and death in Dachau were completed by Eicke under Himmler’s exacting direction. The legalistic phrasing, the comfortable work of men sitting at desks as Himmler so often sat, covers with a bureaucratic gloss the acts of terrorism which the careful rules incite. For example:
‘The term commitment to a concentration camp is to be openly announced as “until further notice”… In certain cases the Reichsführer S.S. and Chief of the German Police will order flogging in addition to detention in a concentration camp… In this case, too, there is no objection to spreading the rumour of this increased punishment… to add to the deterrent effect. Naturally, particularly suitable and reliable people are to be chosen for spreading of such news.
‘The following offenders, considered as agitators will be hanged: anyone who… makes inciting speeches and holds meetings, forms cliques, loiters around with others; who for the purpose of supplying the propaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories, collects true or false information about the concentration camp…’16
Himmler’s secret pursuit of power began outside Prussia, where he realized Goring was omnipotent. Roehm, watchful of the situation, realized that Himmler and Heydrich formed a powerful team and would not be content with the minor place in the Nazi state which had been allotted to them; he decided it might be wise not to alienate the leaders of the S.S. By the summer Göring’s initial energy was spent, and his pleasure-loving nature, combined with the desire to accumulate other positions of importance under Hitler, led him to slacken his control over his subordinates, who were more directly involved in the struggle for supremacy developing between the S.A., the S.S. and the Gestapo. Daluege, Göring’s Chief of Police, had by now decided to keep in touch with Munich.
Artur Nebe was the principal S.S. man among the many working in the Gestapo; Diels claims Nebe was spying on him for Heydrich, and that Karl Ernst, Roehm’s Chief of Staff of the Berlin S.A., was actually threatening his life until Roehm ordered him to desist and suggested to Diels he had better join the S.S. for his own self-protection. The opportunity to do so came after an S.S. raid on Diels’s flat had led to an open breach between Goring and Himmler, which they had the good sense to heal at a meeting in Berlin. Diels was placated with an honorary commission in the S.S. But this did not save him from having to escape in October from threatened arrest by the S.S. on an order, he claimed, issued by Goring himself. This happened after Goring had been shown evidence prepared by Heydrich of Diels’s anti-Nazi activities before his adoption by Göring.
Whether Diels was telling the truth or not, his story is important because it reveals the gradual growth in stature of Heydrich and Himmler in the eyes of the men in Berlin. Germany consisted of many semi-autonomous states both large and small, of which Bavaria, where Hitler’s Nazi faction had originated, was now second only to Prussia in importance. Himmler knew as well as Goring that Hitler wanted to unify the control of Germany, and as a reward for his supreme efficiency in Bavaria he asked the Führer to extend his powers in the remaining states of Germany. In the race to build single police-states, Goring had made a powerful initial spurt, but he lacked the staying-power to win. From October, Himmler began to gather for himself the offices of Chief of the Political Police in the remaining states of Germany, completing the process by March in the following year.17