The Himmler's SS (4 page)

There was absolutely no sign of Himmler's future greatness in 1929. The new SS leader was pale, mild-mannered and prim, with spectacles and prematurely receding hair. Born on 7 October 1900, he was a member of the best Bavarian society and was named after his godfather, Prince Heinrich of Bavaria, to whom his schoolmaster father was tutor. He had welcomed the outbreak of the First World War with enthusiasm, and reported for duty as an officer cadet with the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment in January 1918. However, he was sent to the front just at the moment when the armistice was signed and never saw action, something he always regretted. On 17 December 1918, Himmler was discharged from the army but he retained his military connections by joining the Oberland Freikorps in 1919. He gained an agricultural degree in 1922, then secured employment as a technical assistant with a fertiliser company, only to see his salary lose half its value to inflation in a single month. In August 1923, Himmler became a member of the NSDAP and two months later enrolled in Röhm's Reichskriegsflagge and participated in the Munich putsch, an act which cost him his job. After the dissolution of the party, he took it upon himself to reorganise the NSDAP in Lower Bavaria in preparation for the elections of 1924. He spent much of his time riding around the countryside on an old motorcycle, indoctrinating the locals. Himmler soon became well known in Nazi circles for his energy, enthusiasm and organising ability, and on 12 March 1925 he was summoned by Hitler who appointed him Gauleiter in Lower Bavaria. He was one of the first to join the SS at the end of the year, and in 1926 became responsible for Nazi propaganda throughout Germany, directly under Hitler's orders. Once he had become the Führer's direct partner, Himmler persisted in putting forward his notion that the SS should become an élite force within the party, and one which would be totally devoted to Hitler. At a time when the SA was becoming increasingly rebellious, the notion appealed and so Hitler approved Himmler's succession to Heiden as Reichsführer der SS.

In April 1929, Himmler persuaded Hitler and von Salomon to approve a recruiting plan designed to create a truly élite body out of the SS. In contrast to the SA, which took all comers, only properly selected candidates would be accepted for the SS, based primarily upon their voluntary discipline. There were none of the racial standards imposed on later recruits, but the early SS men had to demonstrate their willingness to be ready for any sacrifice, in individual rather than group action. At that time, recruits were liable to purchase their own uniforms, which could cost up to 40 marks, an enormous expense for an unemployed man, and that factor alone was enough to deter many. However, high personal standards had a great appeal to ex-soldiers and young nationalists, and veterans of the Freikorps also volunteered in large numbers. By the beginning of 1930, the SS had again grown to 1,000 men, which worried von Salomon. Yet it was still technically subordinated to the SA High Command, despite Hitler's instruction that no SA officer was authorised to give orders to the SS during their day-to-day duties.

Protected by SS men, NSDAP Treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz (left, in overcoat) watches a parade in his home town of Günzburg, September 1929. Himmler stands nearest the camera, his position of seniority as Reichsführer der SS indicated solely by the three white stripes on his armband.

Whereas the SS grew steadily, the SA exploded completely. Its sole purpose was to be a mass organisation of pro-Nazi street fighters, and by the time of the first great NSDAP electoral victory of September 1930, 60 per cent of the SA membership were unemployed ruffians who owed allegiance to their local generals, not Hitler. In the north, the SA split down the middle when the new party chief in Berlin, the flamboyant intellectual Dr Joseph Goebbels, arrived to take charge of the city. The Berlin SA began to complain that Hitler and his Bavarian friends were living in the lap of luxury while their comrades in the inner cities were starving. Röhm tried to take charge of the situation, but the SA leaders in Berlin, under SA-Oberführer Walther Stennes, rebelled. On 1 April 1931, Kurt Daluege, now in charge of the SS in Berlin, alerted Hitler that all the Berlin SA had taken sides for Stennes against him. The next day, Stennes' men chased Gauleiter Goebbels out of his office and took over the premises of his newspaper,
Der Angriff
. The revolt spread throughout the whole of northern Germany. The SA Generals in Brandenburg, Hesse, Silesia, Pomerania and Mecklenburg supported Stennes, and Hitler's fall was widely prophesied. However, the uprising lacked organisation and money and died as quickly as it had been born. Göring took a grip of the situation, purging the SA of Stennes' supporters and reorganising the SA throughout the north. Hitler issued his public congratulations to the Berlin SS, which alone had remained loyal to Goebbels and him during the crisis. The devotion of the SS to their Führer had been demonstrated in deeds as well as words. In recognition, Hitler appointed Himmler security chief for the NSDAP headquarters, the Brown House in Munich, on 25 January 1932. In effect, he was now head of the party police.

The SS now grew steadily within the matrix of a rapidly expanding SA and NSDAP. Himmler kept busy, changing and rechanging his unit designations to keep up with the elaborate tables of organisation being constructed by Röhm and his staff. SS membership multiplied five times during 1932, from 10,000 to 50,000, and around 900 officers were commissioned. The SS Stürme had scarcely been numbered when their numbers had to be reassigned to new Standarten. Weak SS companies became even weaker SS regiments, and thirty small SS regiments became tiny SS brigades. The brigade system was then abandoned altogether and light, purely administrative, units known as Oberführer-Abschnitte were interposed between about forty Standarten and the Reichsführer-SS. By now, the political struggle in Germany had taken on the form of a civil war. The Communist Party and socialists set up armed militias and the SA and SS responded. The Brüning government ordered the disbanding of paramilitaries and the prohibition of political uniforms, but it then collapsed and the ‘Cabinet of Barons' set up under Franz von Papen lifted the ban. Thirteen members of the SS were killed in 1932 and several hundreds wounded during street battles with the Red Front. The whole scenario was lapped up by the SS Old Guard, and their catch-phrase, ‘Die Kampfzeit war die beste Zeit' (‘The fighting days were the best') was frequently repeated as a form of boast to young SS men well into the Third Reich period. As the crucial 1933 elections approached, it suited the Nazis to create the impression that Germany was on the verge of anarchy and that they had the solutions. Order would be restored under Hitler. Deals were done with big business. Jobs would be guaranteed for all. Not surprisingly, the NSDAP won a significant electoral victory and on 30 January the old General-feldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg, Reich President and a sort of ‘Ersatz Kaiser' since 1925, entrusted Hitler with the post of Chancellor and the responsibility of forming a government. On 28 February, less than a month after the assumption of power, the Reichstag building was razed to the ground by fire and the communists were blamed. The next day, Hitler issued a decree ‘For the Protection of People and State', giving police powers to the SA and SS. Firearms were issued to 25,000 SA and 15,000 SS acting as Hilfspolizei or auxiliary policemen, and left-wing opponents began to be arrested and herded into makeshift prisons and camps. Soon, 27,000 people were being held in protective custody. In March, Himmler became Police President of Munich and opened the first concentration camp, or Konzentrationslager (KL), at Dachau, as a roughly organised labour camp in which to ‘concentrate' persons who were deemed to be a danger to the state but had not been legally sentenced to prison by a court of law. Other camps were soon established at Sachsenhausen outside Berlin and at Buchenwald near Weimar. Mean-while, a number of company-sized SS detachments were being armed and put on a full-time paid footing, growing to become the Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler', the Führer's close bodyguard, and the SS-Verfügungstruppe or SS-VT, barracked troops at the special disposal of the new Nazi régime. Another new branch of SS volunteers, the Wachverbände, was recruited to guard the concentration camps and later became known as the Death's Head Units, or Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), because of their distinctive collar insignia.

‘Sepp' Dietrich in 1930, as Standartenführer and head of the SS in Upper Bavaria. He wears an impressive array of decorations, including the Bavarian Military Merit Cross with Crown and Swords, the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Classes, the Silesian Eagle and the Tank Battle Badge instituted on 13 July 1921. The latter was awarded to the 100 or so surviving combat veterans of the First World War German Panzer Corps, which in its entirety had comprised a total of only twenty A7V tanks and some captured British armoured vehicles. Dietrich served as an NCO on tank no. 560, codenamed ‘Alter Fritz', which was blown up the day before the war ended. He wore the Tank Battle Badge with pride throughout his service in the SS.

Julius Schreck in his capacity as Hitler's personal SS bodyguard and chauffeur, April 1932. Political uniforms were banned at the time, hence the civilian clothes.

Hitler on the election trail in the autumn of 1932, accompanied by, from left to right, Julius Schaub, ‘Sepp' Dietrich and Kurt Daluege.

While the SS was consolidating its position and controlling its membership and recruitment by a constant purging process, the brown-shirted SA began to throw its weight about noisily. Denied a position in the state to which it felt entitled, the SA talked of a ‘Second Revolution' which would sweep away the bourgeois in the party and the reactionaries in the Reichswehr. Among the SS, the SA leaders became known as ‘Fleischschnitten' or ‘beef steaks', because they were brown on the outside but red on the inside. Röhm, who now commanded a force over forty times the size of the regular army and which included SA cavalry regiments, SA naval battalions and SA air squadrons, demanded the formation of a people's army in which the SA would simply replace the Reichswehr. Röhm, of course, would be Commander-in-Chief. The army Generals called upon Hitler to intervene and the Führer could not refuse their request. Ever since November 1918, the Reichswehr had been the very incarnation of continuity in the state, which had been maintained despite defeat, revolution and civil war. Hitler knew he would never achieve supreme power without the backing of the military, and so decided that the SA would have to be cut down to size. The danger it posed was just too great – not simply the threat of a putsch but the ever-present disorder created by the very men who should have been setting an example of good order. Their incessant brawling, drinking, violence and irresponsible conversation, to say nothing of Röhm's homosexual antics, provoked profound discontent in public opinion. The confidence ordinary Germans had in the new régime was in danger of collapsing altogether. On 28 June 1934, Hitler took the final decision to eliminate the SA leadership. Two days later he personally directed operations at Munich and Bad Wiessee, where Röhm and his subordinates had peacefully gathered at their Führer's request. Following a carefully co-ordinated plan, men of the new armed SS formations arrested and executed Röhm and sixteen senior SA commanders. The SS also seized the opportunity to settle its scores with old enemies, such as the former Bavarian Prime Minister von Kahr, Hitler's adversary during the Munich putsch, who was now found dead in a peat bog with his head smashed in. At least 300 victims paid with their lives for their opposition to the SS in this bloody purge, which came to be known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives'. The SA suffered a loss of power and influence from which it never fully recovered. The new head of the SA, Viktor Lutze, Police President of Hannover, had an ability to get on with the army and SS which was surpassed only by his obsequious loyalty to Hitler. The rank and file of SA members was reduced from 4 million to just over 1 million of the better elements, and they were stripped of their arms.