The principal author of this extended act of human degradation was Himmler, who believed his task to be a necessary duty in which human feeling had no proper place. Suffering was inevitable when a mass-deterrent on this scale had to be created, and he believed the guardians in the camps were more the victims of necessity than those whom they oppressed. It would be quite wrong to think that Himmler had no conscience and no pity; but his real pity was given to the men and women of his Death’s Head units who had to have this fearful burden placed upon them. It became a constant anxiety that preyed upon him and eventually destroyed his health. His feelings about this, the worst of all his tasks, he was eventually to let loose on Kersten, the man who relieved his pain and became as a result the confidant of his most secret thoughts.
During this early phase, however, Himmler took great pride in the concentration camps. In October 1935, after receiving birthday congratulations from Hitler, he conducted Hess and other distinguished guests round the show places of Dachau, where the following month a unit of the S.S. additional to the Death’s Head specialists were to be housed in cheerful barracks built for them by the prisoners. This new unit shared some garrison duty with the camp guards, but their main purpose was to undergo military training. The base camps had married quarters attached to them, and even in the worst phases of the history of the camps during the war the wives and families of the S.S. guards had to accustom themselves to the experience of living near these centres of torture and death.14
After the Roehm purge, the para-military nature of the S.S. was soon to be developed. Hitler had to watch not only those who were critical of his regime abroad and might have been prepared to take action against him, but also the High Command of the German Army, which still had the remnants of power to depose him if the will could be turned into the deed. The period of his gradual open defiance of the Allies and of the terms imposed by them in the Treaty of Versailles was about to begin, and the pattern of training for the S.S. changed in accordance with the stages through which Hitler’s successful defiance of the Allies and his subjection of the High Command were to pass. In January 1935, he regained the Saar by plebiscite; in March he announced conscription for the Army and the open establishment of an Air Force, Goring’s Luftwaffe; in June Ribbentrop, then Ambassador in Britain, succeeded in bringing off the Naval Pact which permitted Germany to develop a limited naval fleet; while in December came the shady dealings over Ethiopia which were in the end to leave Mussolini free to proceed with its conquest.
Hitler decided the S.S. should provide a full division of men trained for war, and he induced the Army to accept this anomalous position by making it part of the plan for conscription. In November 1934 a lieutenant-general in the Army, Paul Hauser, was selected to take charge of this aspect of S.S. training. Hauser took over Heydrich’s leadership school at Bad-Toelz and turned it into the first of a number of highly disciplined establishments for training officer cadets. According to Reitlinger, Hauser after the war regarded his S.S. school at Bad-Toelz as an ideal model for the training of NATO officers. His school represented the beginning of Himmler’s Waffen S.S., the military section of the S.S. corps which was later to become an international force when the S.S. spread its recruitment among the more ‘suitable’ races in the conquered territories.
Himmler’s relations with Hitler, with Goring, Frick, and Schacht, the banker who became Hitler’s Minister of Economics in 1934, with the Army High Command, and above all, with his principal officer, Heydrich, were governed by the opportunism which controlled the actions of all the Nazis, whatever the level of the position they held in the Party or the leadership. Opportunism is the peculiar vice of politicians, and the Nazi mentality, with its complete rejection of any kind of political morality, forced the pace of the intrigues by means of which they tried to outwit each other. Hitler was quite prepared to squander the limited talents of his commandants, ministers and advisers by allowing them to undermine each other’s powers while leaving him supreme as the final arbiter of what after all should be done.
Himmler’s place in this strange and ugly administration was still circumscribed on the one hand by Frick, the weak but obstinate bureaucrat who was Minister of the Interior, and on the other by the High Command of the Army, who disliked the continued existence outside their control of a quarter of a million men in S.S. uniform just as they had disliked the larger, but far less well disciplined forces of Roehm. As far as the bureaucrats were concerned, now that Goring’s attention was diverted from the political police in his pursuit of other interests, Himmler and Heydrich made short work of Frick and of Guertner, the Minister of Justice, both of whom sought during 1934-5 to restrain them and their agents in the S.S. and the Gestapo from seizing any person they wished and holding them in ‘protective custody’. Frick even attempted to draft a law, initially limited to Prussia, giving prisoners in the camps a right of access to the courts. When this draft was put on the agenda of the Prussian Ministerial Council by Göring, Himmler was invited to attend the meeting, though he was not a member of the Council, and he saw to it that the draft was rejected. His victory over Frick was complete, when on 2 May 1935, the Prussian court of Administration accepted that the activities of the Gestapo were outside their jurisdiction.
It was not, however, until 10 February 1936 that Hitler finally decreed that the Gestapo was a special police organization with powers that extended to the whole of Germany. The following June Himmler was made Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior, so confirming by right of decree what had been the practice for a considerable period owing to the absence of any effective opposition. Frick, though technically Himmler’s superior in police matters, gave up the hopeless task of attempting to interfere with him.15
Another open critic of Himmler was Schacht, the banker, who was a ruthless and ambitious autocrat. Having been made Minister of Economics by Hitler, he was determined to conduct his affairs in his own way, though he was eventually to be superseded by Goring. Gisevius states that he went to Schacht’s residence and at his request searched it with an engineer for hidden microphones when the Minister suspected that Heydrich’s agents were spying on him and recording his sharp-tongued remarks; they found a microphone built into the telephone. Schacht in his memoirs, My First 76 Years, claims that Himmler had threatened him at the time he had accepted office, and had even gone so far as to tell him to resign; Schacht sent a curt message back that he would resign only when the Führer told him to do so and that the S.S. should keep out of his way.
The strategy adopted by Himmler and Heydrich against the High Command of the Wehrmacht was even more insidious and led up to the notorious cases against Blomberg and Fritsch early in 1938. Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s Minister of Defence until he was dismissed in 1938 for marrying a prostitute without knowing of her police record, was ostensibly an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. Blomberg was tall, white-haired and smooth-faced, a man with insufficient intelligence or guile to match the cunning of those determined to be rid of him. His effective opposition to the extensive militarization of the S.S. when conscription was introduced by Hitler in 1935 was sufficient to make Himmler his enemy.
Werner von Fritsch had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht in 1934 without Blomberg’s approval; indeed Fritsch and Beck, his Chief of Staff, who was later to be closely involved in the Army plot against Hitler’s life, were rumoured to be un-co-operative, and opposed to the introduction of conscription, though Hitler continued to have confidence in them. The rumours were instigated by Himmler, and Goring, who by 1935 wanted Command of the Army for himself, was by now prepared to take any suitable opportunity to denigrate both Blomberg and Fritsch. The atmosphere in Berlin vibrated with gossip about putsch and counter-putsch.