Gestapo (13 page)

The article then develops the ideal behind “protective custody” as a means of silencing opposition. Protective custody meant concentration camps. The Gestapo, of course, had the exclusive right to send people to concentration camps, and there was no appeal outside the Gestapo. The Decree of February 10th, 1936, already cited, had put it above the law.

If it is wondered how the S.D. and Gestapo knew the enemies of the State from its friends, the answer is that there was no difficulty about this. There were the informers. There were also innumerable devices. The S.D., for example, developed an elaborate organization for the secret marking of ballot papers, which told them who had voted “No,” or deliberately spoilt his paper, in the referendum. The result would then be passed on to the Gestapo for action. And so it went on.

The S.S. weekly newspaper,
Das Schwarze Korps
, was developed by Heydrich into an extremely powerful instrument of blackmail and persecution. Unrestrained by any considerations of libel, it hit out right and left with the general aim of humiliating and frightening into inaction conspicuous figures who could not be simply arrested and sequestered by the Gestapo without fuss.
Schwarze Korps
could draw freely for its material from the secret dossiers of the S.D., and it did so, so that as often as not it was able to mix truth with its lies. It acted as a spearhead in Heydrich's attack on Christianity, which was one of the major
preoccupations of the Gestapo in those peaceful days before the war. For the Christian Church was the exception to the rule which permitted no organized bodies outside the Nazi Party. Himmler, though nominally a Catholic, resented its power, and Heydrich seems to have had a pathological hatred of the Churches, which was perhaps his strongest sustained emotion. He sought to ruin them by discrediting them through a long and sustained campaign of slander, backed up by Gestapo action.

The cartoonists of
Schwarze Korps
were let loose on the priests and the nuns, and the paper was full of unfounded charges against individuals—from embezzlement and currency offenses to homosexuality and rape. At the same time the Gestapo made frequent raids on monasteries and convents and rarely came back with empty hands. To the very end there were numbers of German priests who fought back bravely—to the end, that is to say, of their freedom. Himmler and Heydrich were correct in recognizing in the Church a serious and dangerous opponent, and they gave a lot of thought to it as a long-term problem. They were far-sighted, and they were prepared to wait a long time for the final undoing of a worthy opponent. And it was in this mood that Heydrich conceived his plan for disrupting the Church from within.

He proposed to introduce into the Churches selected youths who would be enrolled in the S.S., instructed in their future role, and then sent as ordinary seminarists into the theological colleges, passing out after ordination into the priesthood with the aim, in Heydrich's good time, of organizing a spectacular revolt from within. This plan came to nothing because Hitler, for once, drew the line at it; he refused to exempt Heydrich's candidates for the priesthood, drawn from the Hitler Youth, from their compulsory military service. This we have on the authority of S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Willy Hoettl, one time assistant of Heydrich in Amt VI of the R.S.H.A.

The campaign against Christianity, indeed, never made much progress. The Gestapo had to rely too much on charges which were obviously trumped up, and the German people, having squandered their right to think and act for themselves all along the line, clung stubbornly to the last link with an exterior reality. They refused to believe
Heydrich's charges, which by their insolent extravagance developed a resistance not unlike the resistance to his own attitude developed by Senator McCarthy in America. Also, of course, there were the Jews, who were easier game. But the persecution, and then the attempted extermination, of the Jews is a story in itself.

At the trial of Heinrich Baab, a Frankfurt Gestapo official of low rank, in 1950, there appeared as the hundred and fifty-second witness an intelligent and dapper figure who gave his name as Kurt Lindow, Doctor of Philosophy. He seemed an excellent type of German, who had already paid for allowing himself, perhaps weakly, to support the Nazi régime to the extent of engaging himself in one of its more disreputable institutions. He had, indeed, at one time been an S.S. colonel, in charge of subsection IVA la of the R.S.H.A.—i.e., that section of the Gestapo concerned with Russian prisoners-of-war. Because of this, after giving evidence for the prosecution at Nuremberg, he had been given three and a half years' imprisonment at a Darmstadt trial in 1948, as a member of the second category of Nazis. Since he had been interned since 1945, he was deemed to have served his sentence and set free.

The trial of Heinrich Baab was an affair of extreme squalor. Baab was a minor official of gross aspect and plebian background whose job had been to get rid of the Frankfurt Jews. He had beaten and tortured, dragged shrieking children away from their mothers, despatched his quotas of human cargo in sealed box-cars to the frontier, until finally he was able to declare that there were no more Jews in Frankfurt. He had done all this without knowing that he was doing it, and so was able to face the court of his fellow-countrymen with assurance, a clear conscience, and massive self-respect. For example, he was asked by the Prosecution whether it was true that when mothers herded in the market-place had asked him in desperation what was to become of their children, he had answered: “Don't worry about those Jewish bastards. You'll soon be
on your way up the chimney and your troubles will be over.” He replied: “I was an idealist in my profession. If I used such expressions as ‘Jewish bastard' or ‘Jewish sow,' it simply meant that this official language had become so much a part of my flesh and blood that I saw nothing unusual in it. I never used anything but spiritual weapons in dealing with offenders.”

This creature, this Baab, with his spiritual weapons, was in the end found guilty on fifty-five counts of murder, on twenty-one counts of attempted murder, on thirty counts of assault and battery, and a variety of lesser offenses. There was nothing remarkable about him, except that his trial was recorded with extreme virtuosity by Miss Kay Boyle. There were thousands like him all over Germany, subordinate Gestapo officials of plebian origin and plebian mentality who were given absolute authority over their fellow citizens.

What seemed remarkable, although it was not, was the sight of Dr. Kurt Lindow in that gallery. It seemed almost indecent to suggest that this excellent and dapper citizen could conceivably have any connection with Herr Baab. He was a cut above that sort of thing—or he would have been but for the fact that the Gestapo made all its members kin.

To quote Miss Boyle:

“Lindow was clearly a man of intelligence and education. Both before and during the war, he travelled widely in a diplomatic capacity, representing Nazi interests at international conferences. His oval face was tanned, his dark hair was perfectly groomed, and his gray felt hat, his black shoes, his well-creased trousers, and his white shirt were impeccable.”

He gave his evidence politely but in the usual evasive manner. The whole thing, one would have said, was a little below him. And, indeed, he implied as much himself. “The implication was that he had operated on a very high level and that he knew scarcely anything of what went on below.” He was quite willing, however, to tell the few things he knew. For example, he knew what “protective custody” was. It was a measure to “protect from persecution individuals who had been under suspicion or under arrest”—
that was his definition of Belsen, Ravensbrueck, and Buchenwald. But he did not really know about the Jews: certainly he had noticed that there were no more people in the streets wearing the Star of David, and he had supposed that the Jews had all been resettled in Eastern ghettos.

It seemed a shame to worry the cultivated Dr. Lindow with these sordid matters, and he evidently thought so too, but was prepared to do his duty willingly. When he had finished giving his evidence the judge told him that he might go.

“And then three things happened simultaneously. The faces of the spectators turned wearily towards the door, awaiting the entry of the next witness; Lindow rose from his chair, and, immaculate gray felt hat in hand, began his bow to the Court before taking leave; and Kosterlitz [the Prosecutor in the Baab case under trial] jumped to his feet and called out, in a voice that roused the courtroom from its sleep, ‘Herr Wachtmeister, place Dr. Lindow under arrest! I accuse him of defying all international and human law by murdering Soviet prisoners-of-war who were under his care.'

“The police officer so addressed made his way to Lindow and requested him to follow him from the room. Lindow completed his bow to the Court with dignity, and, as two men in plain clothes fell into step flanking him, he walked towards the door. Some members of the Press hastened from the courtroom and walked beside him and his escort along the hall and up the stairs. And there, as he climbed, his composure left him. The color drained from his face, and with each step he took and each breath he drew, he sobbed like an aged man. When a member of the Press speculated on his being extradited to Russia for trial, this one hundred and fifty-second witness covered his face with his hands, leaned against the soiled plaster wall for strength, and groaned.”

Why did Dr. Lindow groan and suddenly look like an old man?

He had been nothing but a Gestapo officer doing his duty in charge of sub-section IVA la of the R.S.H.A. But this duty, among other things, and at one time and another,
made him responsible for issuing the execution warrants for Soviet officers screened by the Gestapo in the prisoner-of-war camps and deemed fit only to be exterminated.… To him, also, in his office in the R.S.H.A., had come the periodical reports of the massacres of Jews and Communists in Russia by the
Einsatzgruppen
—who used, literally, to compete with one another for the highest number of killings day by day, in order to please Himmler. All this was now going to come out, and Lindow knew, as he leaned groaning against the wall, that if he were tried by a German court he would get a life sentence and have to put away his gray felt hat for ever; and that if ever he were extradited to Russia he would be shot or hanged. The officers of the Gestapo, and other German official bodies concerned with killing people on a large scale, almost invariably turned out to be strangely sensitive when it came to being killed themselves—unlike their opposite numbers in the Soviet N.K.V.D., who, though they kill far less frequently, are inclined to take it as all part of the day's work when their own turn comes. It is this mixture of brutality with cowardice and righteous indignation which makes these people more unpleasant to write about than any other body of men in the world: few things are more repellent than the brute who bursts into tears.

But there were so many like him. Dr. Lindow is chosen from among thousands, partly because we have an unusually clear picture of him, partly because he is representative of a large class of S.D. and Gestapo officials, the gentleman thugs, whose background was sympathetic and cultivated, who in their first youth had become economists like Otto Ohlendorf, historians like Ernst Kaltenbrunner, lawyers like Eichmann, but who worked side by side with the Baabs and the dregs of the underworld, and exhibited always a perfect readiness to commit with their own hands the most frightful atrocities. It is this aspect of the Gestapo and the S.D. that is most puzzling of all. The commandants of concentration camps were usually chosen for their brutality, their staffs always. Thus it was axiomatic that the Kramers, the Kochs, the Mewes would find their way to Belsen, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrueck. Their particular activities, whether it was horse-whipping naked women prisoners, watching police dogs tear human beings to
pieces, selecting prisoners with elaborate tattoo patterns to be killed and skinned because they wanted the patterns for their lamp-shades, killing prisoners with perfect teeth so that their unblemished skulls might be used for paperweights—their particular activities are of no more interest than the particular activities of any psychopath anywhere: every country has women like Dorothea Binz, the head wardress of Ravensbrueck, who specialized in setting dogs on people. In countries other than Germany, however, they are kept under restraint, and their fantasies, if translated into action, are deemed to have only a clinical interest. From what we have already seen of Himmler and Heydrich and senior S.S. villains it is understandable that they should have staffed their concentration camps, which were officially regarded as extermination camps (“extermination through work” as opposed to “extermination by gassing,” as in the annihilation camps), with the scum of Germany.

What is not understandable is how the bright young men of Heydrich, many of them recruited in the first instance as intelligence officers from the intellectual professions, should have been prepared to work with this scum. How did Dr. Lindow do it? What made him think, as he evidently did think, that, after doing so, he was a worthy citizen of a worthy race? And the even larger question: why, when it was all over, did so many Germans clamor, not by any means always in vain, for the release of some of the worst offenders? What made them do it?

There is a general belief that what was in fact the normal routine of the Gestapo was confined to exceptional cases. Thus, in various memoirs of survivors, and in statements by unimpeachable eyewitnesses, we are told of all but inconceivable behavior on the part of this or that Gestapo or S.D. official, and, for want of easily accessible evidence to the contrary, are inclined to assume that these were excesses on the part of individual sadists. For example, we know that Mrs. Peter Churchill, “Odette,” had her toenails pulled out, one by one, to make her speak. We know that Wing-Commander Yeo-Thomas had to submit to the deliberate crushing of his testicles, as well as to being all but battered to death and half drowned in baths of ice-cold water, with the girl typists and secretaries of the Gestapo prison looking on. But these were not exceptions,
though every member of the S.S. and a large number of other Germans would like us to believe they were. They were part of a recognized drill, a drill which every Gestapo official must have known by heart.