On 19 January 1935, Blomberg, as part of an attempt to restore friendly relations, invited both Goring and Himmler to address the High Command in the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy, but they used the occasion to make it clear to the Army that a military putsch would be illegal. Nevertheless Blomberg went even further in his efforts to appease Himmler; he invited him in the following month to address a gathering of Army officers in the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Hamburg. Conscription, though still unannounced, was already agreed and Himmler took his revenge on Blomberg by announcing that the S.S. in time of war would have to be increased in numbers to fight the enemy inside the frontiers of Germany while the Army fought abroad; in this event the S.S. could resist any treacherous stab in the back on the home front such as happened in 1918. As he spoke of the ideal men he had enlisted in the S.S., he seemed to be challenging the racial purity of the officers in his audience.
In January 1935 Blomberg had appointed Canaris as the Chief of Military Intelligence, the Abwehr, an office which Heydrich, who had carefully informed on Canaris’s predecessor, would have liked to absorb into the S.D., though this was hardly possible at the time. Thus began the uneasy relationship between Heydrich and his old naval instructor which covered the divergent political exploitation of their two Intelligence services. An initial working agreement, known as the Ten Commandments, limited Canaris’s operations to military and not political espionage. A superficially friendly social atmosphere was re-established, and Heydrich was able to relieve the tension once more by playing his violin in Canaris’s family circle. But the Admiral soon grew to fear Heydrich and his ultimate influence on Hitler and was prepared to receive secret information from such men as Helldorf, the Chief of Police in Berlin, about the activities of both Himmler and Heydrich.
Himmler’s interest was by now no longer limited to Germany. He thought of those Germans who lived abroad, and in 1936 came to terms with Ernst Bohle, head of the foreign organization of the Nazi Party, which was concerned with spreading Nazism among Germans outside the Reich and establishing whatever proved possible in the way of espionage by setting up agents for Heydrich’s S.D. abroad. Out of this intrusion into fields which, if they belonged properly to any department, were the concern of Canaris for Military Intelligence or of the Foreign Office, arose the curious incident of the Tukhachewski plot against the Stalin regime and the forged documents which Heydrich supplied to the Soviet government.
Marshal Mikhail Tukhachewski was at this time Deputy Defence Commissar of the Soviet Union, and had been in 1926 the principal Russian signatory of the protocols which had introduced German military experts into Russia. The story, as it has been reconstructed subsequently from statements and admissions by various men involved, 16 seems to have been that Heydrich heard late in 1936 that Marshal Tukhachewski and other generals in the Russian High Command were planning a military putsch against Stalin. Two lines of action were possible to make use of this information; the first was to support the putsch, the other to see that knowledge of it reached Stalin in such a form that the largest possible number of Russian generals should be arrested and tried for treason. Canaris, who also knew of the plot, favoured the first line until a more opportune time came to use the second; Himmler and Heydrich wanted to exploit the second line of action immediately. Later Heydrich claimed that Hitler authorized the forging of documents by Behrens of the S.D. and a Russian political agent who was in the pay of the Germans. The ‘documents’ which were actually used as evidence in the subsequent secret treason trial in Moscow in 1937, bore the forged signatures not only of the Russian generals, but of the German officers with whom they were represented as being in touch. These papers were sold by Heydrich to Stalin through Russian agents. Stalin is said to have paid 3 million gold roubles for the evidence of his generals’ treason; but he marked the money, since he rightly assumed that it would be used by the Germans to pay their agents in Russia, and that this would enable the police to trace a number of S.D. spies. Later it also emerged that Stalin may well have planned the whole operation and made use of the S.D. to provide him with the evidence he needed to convict Tukhachewski and his associates.
The final stage in the modification of Himmler’s power did not come until the summer of 1936. This was preceded by the legal recognition of the Gestapo in a Prussian statute of 10 February in which a clause was inserted that no judicial appeal could be instituted against any decision made by the Gestapo; its activities were absolute. By a succession of decrees starting on 17 June, Himmler was, as we have seen, made Chief of the German Police, an office still separate from that of the Reichsführer S.S.17
Himmler celebrated his new appointment with an odd ceremonial on 2 July at which he commemorated the thousandth anniversary of the death of Heinrich I, the protagonist of German expansion in the East. This took place at Quedlinburg, a town in the region of the Harz mountains which had been founded by Heinrich.
In his speech about one of the ‘greatest Germans ever’, as Gunther d’Alquen called him in a glowing description of the event, Himmler praised the ‘clever, cautious, tenacious politician’ in terms he felt also suited himself. He used the occasion to attack the influence of the Church in German history; Heinrich, he said, had refused to allow the Church to interfere in State affairs. According to Himmler, this Saxon Duke known as Henry the Fowler, who became the founder of the German state, ‘never forgot that the strength of the German people lies in the purity of their blood’.18
In an article published in the same year, Himmler impressed once again on readers, whom he addressed as fellow peasants, that the precious heritage of blood in the German race must be maintained by force:
‘I, as Reichsführer S.S., who am myself a peasant according to ancestry, blood and being, would like to state this second fact to you, the German peasants: the idea of blood, advocated by the S.S. from the beginning, would be condemned if it were not eternally bound to the value and the holiness of the soil.’
The S.S. themselves, he wrote, stood side by side with the German peasant stock, and were ceaselessly vigilant to protect the noble German blood:
‘I know that there are some people in Germany who become sick when they see these black uniforms; we understand the reason for this and do not expect we shall be loved by all that number of people; those who come to fear us, in any way or at any time, must have a bad conscience toward the Führer and the nation. For these persons we have established an organisation called the Security Service… Without pity we shall wield a merciless sword of justice…
‘Each one of us knows he does not stand alone, but that this tremendous force of 200,000 men, who are bound together by oath, gives him immeasurable strength… We assemble and march according to unalterable laws as a National Socialist military order of prominently Nordic men, and as a sworn community on our way into a far future,… ancestors of later generations, and necessary for the eternal life of the Germanic people.’