Gestapo (16 page)

In saying that the Eichmann organization was largely independent of the nominal chiefs of the Gestapo, the last
thing intended is to suggest that these did not know what was going on. Most of them were almost certainly unaware of the scale and range of the extermination camps; but all knew they existed; and all, at one time and another, were called to co-operate with the IVA 4b specialists in arranging for the round-up and deportation of the Jews.

We find Dannecker, for example, elaborately reporting the progress of his actions to his Sipo chief, Knochen; and when Dannecker had been taken away from Paris for corrupt practices (nothing to do with Jews: this inconspicuous little man took it into his head to start a chain of night clubs on the side) we find his successor, S.S. Captain Roethke, conferring with Knochen about one of the most unspeakable actions of the war.

This was the case of the four thousand fifty-one Jewish children who were seized with their parents during the great Paris round-up of July, 1942. Nearly seven thousand children and adults were herded into the bleak spaces of the Velodrôme d'Hiver. For five days they had no food, and the only water available came from a single street hydrant. There were ten latrines for the seven thousand. There were many pregnant women, a number of whom gave birth. Many individuals went noisily off their heads, and thirty people died. There they waited while Knochen and Roethke discussed in a leisurely manner with the Vichy officials what was to be done with the children. On the fifth day the mothers were taken away, leaving their children behind, to start the long journey to the gas chambers on the other side of Europe. D'Arquier, the Vichy official, held that the children should be spared and sent to French orphanages. But Knochen and Roethke took their duties more seriously. Plainly the children should be exterminated too. The only snag was transport. But Eichmann, active as ever, had been busying himself in Berlin, and wired to say that he had been able to arrange for enough transport to take the four thousand fifty-one children to Auschwitz too. So, torn from their parents, inadequately looked after by other internees—mainly the very old and the sick—the children were taken to the transit camp at Drancy, the French railhead for Auschwitz, and, three or four hundred at a time, put on the trains, and trundled off to death.

This action took place not in Eastern Europe, but in Paris, and not under pressure of any Allied advance, but in the summer of 1942, at leisure, and with Germany seemingly victorious. Many people have said that Knochen was a good fellow. No doubt by some standards he was, but the standards are not high enough.

It is clearly impossible, however hard one may try, to limit the responsibility for the worst activities of the Sipo to certain kinds of grades of officials. The responsibility is indivisible. Routine administrative officials were required to co-operate with Captain Nowak, Eichmann's transport officer, in arranging for the transports which took the Jews to Poland. An apparently innocuous official in the administrative branch, Rauff, was responsible for supplying and servicing the gassing vans. And so on. Nor, it may be believed, were the Germans concerned with who was and who was not responsible. They were simply obeying orders, and indeed they were; and there was nothing else to be done.

S.S. Major General Ohlendorf of the S.D. put the matter very clearly at Nuremberg. Confessing to the murder of ninety thousand Jews when, at the age of thirty-five, he commanded
Einsatzgruppe
D on the Russian Southern Front, he was asked by the Defense Counsel for the Gestapo whether he had ever felt scruples at the tasks he was required to carry out. He answered, “Yes, of course.” “And how was it,” Defense continued, “that they were carried out regardless of these scruples?” Ohlendorf replied, “Because to me it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry out orders given by the leaders of the State.” And when he was questioned further about the legality of such orders, Ohlendorf replied, perplexed, “I do not understand your question; since the order was issued by the superior authorities, the question of legality could not arise in the minds of these individuals, for they had sworn obedience to the people who had issued the orders.”

They were thus absolved in advance from blame for anything they might be called upon to do.

And yet it was not so simple as that. Nobody has any right to demand that another man shall risk his life by standing on his own ideas of right and wrong (it should be remembered, nevertheless, that many of the Gestapo's victims did precisely this, and died as a result). It may
reasonably be asked, however, that if a man decides to massacre innocent women and children as ordered from above he should be clear in his own mind whether he is acting in accordance with a philosophy of obedience, for which he would be ready to go to the stake, or to save his own skin. And it is a fair criticism of the Ohlendorfs that they never seem to have begun to consider this question: obedience and self-preservation were hopelessly mixed up in their minds. It may also be reasonably objected that even if an individual decides that he must carry out the commandments of authority and massacre women and children, it is not incumbent on him to act with excessive zeal: the Gestapo almost invariably acted with excessive zeal and obeyed their instructions not only in the letter but also in the maniacal spirit of their originator.

They had plenty of opportunities for saving the lives of their victims and some shreds of their own self-respect by going easy. Instead, they competed with one another in frightfulness. Ohlendorf, when asked by the Prosecution why his
Einsatzgruppe
had accounted for fewer Jews than the other three, replied that he thought that his fellow-leaders exaggerated the number of their killings. Eichmann, we know, exaggerated considerably the number of Jews he had sent to the gas chambers. And, indeed, throughout the early stages of the Russian campaign, there was a strongly competitive mood: just as the various armies were inclined to exaggerate the amount of ground and the number of prisoners they had taken, so the back-area scavengers exaggerated the number of civilians they had massacred. There was, as far as is known, no order from Hitler about this: the Gestapo and the S.D. thought it up for themselves.

Again, while the Gestapo was above the law, so that there could be no appeal from its decisions, this very fact enabled it, had it so desired, to go easy. But it did not; nor did it welcome determined opposition to its actions by a few brave men, an opposition which, had its reluctance to carry out Hitler's orders been genuine, it could have magnified on occasion into an insurmountable barrier (for there were limits to what the Gestapo could get away with when confronted with opposition) and an excuse for doing nothing.

For example, at a conference between the Army and the
Gestapo held shortly after the opening of the Russian campaign the question of screening Soviet prisoners-of-war with a view to executing the undesirables was under discussion; there was a good deal of military objection to this programme, but Mueller was adamant. He insisted that the order must be carried out to the letter, and the only concession he made to the soldiers was that the executions, to be carried out by recruits under command of the Gestapo, should not take place in the presence of troops, in deference to their sensibilities. Mueller, had he wished to soften this order, or even to postpone it, could at least have used the opposition of the soldiers as a means of gaining time; instead, he rode them down, not, it seems, because Hitler so instructed him, but because he would have the support of Hitler if it came to a showdown.

Again, the head of the Gestapo for Silesia, Dr. Mildner, came into head-on collision with the Chief Public Prosecutor at Katowice, early in the Russian campaign, when the Germans were still apparently winning. The Public Prosecutor went so far as to protest to the Reichs Minister of Justice at the summary hanging of alleged Resistance leaders “without notification to the competent court.” Mildner fought back. He not only said that the past executions were imperative but went on to declare that “with the authority of the RfSS [Himmler]” (not, it will be noted, “under instructions from Himmler”) “these executions by public hanging at the place of the crime” would have to be continued in the future until all the opposition had been destroyed.

As a final example, it has been pleaded that the head of the Paris Gestapo, S.S. Colonel Knochen, strongly disapproved of some of the more spectacularly cruel methods he was called upon to practice. But in Paris it was easier than anywhere else in Europe for a reluctant Gestapo official to practice obstruction and ca' canny. It was known and understood in Berlin that the French required very delicate handling, involving concessions on the German side unthinkable in Eastern Europe. It was known in particular that they showed an incomprehensible reluctance to connive at the deportation and murder of their Jews, and sometimes showed both boldness and ingenuity in frustrating Eichmann's plans.

Against this background S.S. Colonel Knochen, had he really been as kind and gentle as his apologists declare, could have exercised a very strong influence for good. But he did not. For example, in the matter of the Jewish children, torn from their parents by Roethke, with the help of Colonel Knochen's men, and condemned to those four ghastly days and nights in the cycle-racing stadium, we find the Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, d'Arquier de Pellepoix, pleading for the children to be sent to orphanages and Knochen supporting Roethke in his insistence on deporting them to Auschwitz. D'Arquier himself was a poor and craven creature, who must have been driven to desperation to argue with Knochen: he had recently been given the job because his predecessor, Xavier Vallat, had proved too obstructive and had defeated Dannecker's efforts at every turn, and because the Vichy Chief of Police, Bossuet, refused to have anything to do with deporting French Jews. Nothing could have been easier than for Knochen to report that it was against German interests to murder the children of French Jews. Nothing could have been more true. But Knochen, the mild and reluctant Gestapo chief, insisted on their being murdered according to the book.

The activities of the Gestapo and the S.D. in occupied Europe fell broadly into two categories: terror and extermination. For the fulfilment of both they depended materially on the assistance of other organizations; on the Concentration Camp Administration (W.V.H.A.) run for Himmler by S.S. Lieutenant General Pohl and staffed by the S.S.; on the Waffen S.S.; on Daluege's Orpo; and, to a lesser but highly variable extent, on the Wehrmacht.

Heydrich would have preferred it otherwise. If he had been able to get his own way he would have centralized the whole apparatus of tyranny and massacre on his R.S.H.A. For example, quite early in his career he made a determined effort to get personal control of the concentration camps, and it was even written into the Law of February
10th, 1936, formally setting up the Gestapo, that it should be responsible for their administration. But this was never put into effect. Himmler reserved the concentration camps for himself, and there is no doubt at all that in withholding them from the Gestapo he was deliberately working to prevent Heydrich from becoming too powerful. He was content to use Heydrich's gifts, his drive, his ruthlessness, his boldness, and his imagination; but he had no intention whatever of allowing Heydrich—or, for that matter, anybody else—to become his deputy and rival.

Heydrich, for his part, habitually looked a very long way ahead, sometimes too far. We have had an example of this in his scheme for corrupting the German Church from within. Another plan of his, which was too ambitious to begin with, was the establishment of special Action Groups or
Einsatzgruppen
for policing the back areas of occupied territory—a plan which was drawn up in the summer of 1938, before Munich, to be put into effect when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.

It was no fault of Heydrich's that the Gestapo had to rely on outside help; but the fact that it did so rely complicates our picture greatly and makes it extremely hard to apportion the responsibility for this or that particular atrocity. It is impossible, furthermore, to consider the performance of the Gestapo in isolation; we are compelled to introduce into our narrative figures who did not belong to the Gestapo and who were not under the orders of the Gestapo, but whose activity, nevertheless, was an integral part of the Gestapo terror.

Thus, while the Gestapo was in no way responsible for the administration of the concentration camps, it possessed under Article 2 of the decree of the Reich President of February 28th, 1933, the exclusive right to send individuals into “protective custody” (e.g., a concentration camp). It was, moreover, charged with the task of grading the various concentration camps into three categories, from the mildest—e.g., Dachau—to the bloodiest—e.g., Mauthausen, which was an extermination camp. It had, moreover, permanent representatives in the camps, acting as “political advisers.” In a word, when the Gestapo committed a prisoner to “protective custody” it knew precisely what would happen to the prisoner, and desired it.

In the case of the camps designed primarily for immediate extermination—e.g., Auschwitz II (Auschwitz I was a labor camp), Belzek, Treblinka—the connection was even closer. For these camps were designed as part of the apparatus of the “final solution,” the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Heydrich was formally in charge of the “final solution,” and Eichmann and his subordinates who rounded up the Jews and arranged for their delivery to the gas chambers, which were built and maintained on their behalf, belonged, as we have seen, to Section 4b of the Gestapo. Thus the actual killings, carried out in the main by S.S. subordinates of the Concentration Camp Administration, were in fact ordered by the Gestapo.

The institution from which both the Gestapo and the S.D. tried hardest to disassociate themselves was the notorious
Einsatzgruppe
or Action Group. At Nuremberg the Defense went to extreme lengths of hair splitting to prove that the Action Groups were nothing to do with either the Gestapo or the S.D. as such, but were special-purpose units under Army command which happened to be led in most cases by men who happened to have belonged to the S.D. and also to include in all cases members of the Gestapo. When we come to consider the record of the Action Groups the reason for the anxiety of the Defense will be plain. But at the bottom of all the camouflage, there is documentary proof that the Action Group was in fact the brain-child of Heydrich and the special treasure of the S.D. And it is interesting that although the Action Groups did not get fully into their stride until the early days of the invasion of Russia, when they developed into an instrument of mass murder, the simple and logical end of the whole process of police rule, the idea had been thought up and committed to paper as early as 1938.