Secret Policeman

(See Cover)

To the anxious question of "Will there be war in Europe?" the right answer early this week could be given only by those who knew what was in the mind of Adolf Hitler. Among the few Nazi higher-ups who should have known the Fuehrer's mind (who as usual kept all he knew discreetly to himself) was a man named Heinrich Himmler. Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, State Councillor of Prussia, deputy of the Reichstag, Herr Himmler is better known for two other far more important titles: Reichsfuehrer of the Schutzstaffel (the famed, black-uniformed 55 Guards), and Inspector of the dread, notorious Gestapo (State Secret Police). From the founder and ruler of the Third Reich's State Secret Police there can be few State secrets.

Inordinately ambitious, a weaver of grandiose political dreams, Herr Himmler might find war, if it comes, not to his taste. War might mean the rise once more to power of the old Prussian Army machine and a policeman's lot might not be so important in war as in peace. But war or no war, anything that might happen to eclipse or remove Herr Himmler's aging boss can be expected to be the signal for a dogfight for power between Herren Goering, Goebbels and Himmler. Herr Himmler, the youngest of the lot, does not intend to be the least.

Birthday. Meanwhile, if nothing intervenes, Greater Germany will vociferously acclaim the soth birthday of its creator and Fuehrer this week. On the same day--April 20--Herr Himmler will quietly, without public fanfare, celebrate the fifth anniversary of his appointment as Inspector of the Gestapo. Troops will march down Berlin's Unter den Linden and through the crowded Tiergarten as the 50-year-old Fuehrer receives the frenzied homage of an adoring nation. Clustered around Herr Hitler on a reviewing stand are to be the familiar, conspicuous figures of the Nazi hierarchy--fat, strapping Field Marshal Hermann Wilhelm Goering, mousy little Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, coarse, Jew-baiting Julius Streicher, Nazi Deputy Leader Rudolf Hess, Labor Front Leader Dr. Robert Ley. Inspector Himmler will be there too, but the weak, fleshy-chinned, owlish Gestapo chief, looking more like an Austrian Gymnasium teacher than a leader of men, will be the least conspicuous of them all.

No orator, scarcely a figure calculated to arouse much personal enthusiasm. Herr Himmler's primary function in Naziland has so far been to be neither seen nor heard but to be felt. The housewife who puts quilted covers over her telephone for fear the Gestapo can listen in on household conversations even when the receiver catch is down has felt Herr Himmler's not-too-remote presence. The German who uses prearranged codes in letters to his relatives in or out of the country decidedly feels Policeman Himmler's existence. The discontented merchant, the dissident Party member, the persecuted Jew, the defiant churchman, the too-independent Army officer have with good reason dreaded his heavy hand--and often landed in one of Herr Himmler's concentration camps. Moreover, little neighboring countries have particular reason to fear him; the presence of 55 Fuehrer Himmler's young men in Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Lithuania, has invariably meant that the Nazi Reich was about to expand its borders.

The description of Europe's greatest previous secret policeman--Napoleon's Minister of Police Joseph Fouche--as a "cold, selfish, remorseless fanatic" fits Policeman Himmler too. Of all the Nazi leaders, he is the most uncompromising, the least likely to show mercy or kindness. He is also unique among Nazi big shots in that he literally grew up with the Party, never knew or worked at much of anything else.

Student. Born in Munich in 1900, the son of a Catholic schoolteacher, he became an ensign-bearer in the Eleventh Bavarian Infantry Regiment at 17, but saw no active service at the World War front. The War over, he joined Fhrer Hitler's struggling German Labor Party at 19, was noted more for his regular attendance at Munich beer-hall powwows than for any great forcefulness. To his parents he was a problem child; in his Party he had the reputation of a hellraiser. In the famed--and abortive--beer-hall Putsch of 1923 he marched along with the boys (as the Party's flag-bearer), but the Republican police considered him so unimportant that they did not bother to arrest him. While Hitler was serving time in Landsberg Prison and Goering was recovering from his wounds in Sweden, the youthful Heinrich was a student of experimental agriculture at the University of Munich.

When the Fuehrer was released from jail, young, jobless Himmler joined up with the slowly forming Storm Troops. Soon Storm Troop Leader Ernst Roehm (a notorious homosexual) and the Fuehrer quarreled. Roehm quit the country, became military adviser to Bolivia. The Fuehrer saw the weakness of the loosely organized, unwieldy mob of Brown Shirts and decided to form, within the Storm Troopers, a carefully chosen elite group of men to be known as the Schutzstaffel ("Protective Corps"), better known as the 55 Guards. Their primary function at first was to guard the Fuehrer. First 55 leader was the late Julius Schreck, the Fuehrer's adjutant and chauffeur. In the next four years the leadership was changed three times; in 1929 Himmler got his crack at the job and the organization began to hum. He and it have hummed ever since.

Stripling. Ernst Roehm was persuaded to return to Germany in 1930. He found that during his absence a formidable black-uniformed army of 100,000 had come into being, that the Fuehrer's affections had been shifted away from the 2,000,000 Storm Troops to the 55, that the Storm Troops were being relegated back to the gutter whence they had originally sprung. And although Leader Himmler was nominally Leader Roehm's subordinate, actually Heinrich Himmler took his orders direct from Adolf Hitler himself.

The stage was set for a fight-to-the-finish within the Party. The Nazis came to power, and Roehm demanded that his Brown Shirts be recognized as a national defense unit. The Fuehrer's reply was to sick the stripling Himmler on the veteran Roehm. There followed the memorable night of June 29-30, 1934, when Himmler and Hitler, flanked by 55 men, raided the headquarters of the disorganized Storm Troopers in and near Munich, killed Roehm and his supporters. Simultaneously all over Germany the Nazi Party's most vociferous dissidents were rounded up and executed. In that slaughter of hundreds, young Himmler proved his mettle, showed the qualities of ruthlessness and brutality so necessary in his job, demonstrated his undying love for his Fuehrer.

After that Heinrich Himmler's rise was meteoric. He soon was to become the shadow behind the swastika. The creation of a secret police in 1933 which was to work hand in hand with 55 men in ferreting out and putting down possible disaffection gave him immense power. Gestapo agents were recruited from the 55 Corps, and worked hand in hand with 55 troopers; the Gestapo, after spotting its victim, often let the 55 men carry out the arrest, trial, execution. In 1936, he was made Police Commissioner and supreme director of law & order in all Germany.

Nordic Order. Under Commissioner & Inspector Himmler Germany soon became the most policed country in the world. He purged, sacked, centralized, reorganized the regular German police until last January he was at last able to pronounce Germany's regular police force "politically reliable." Taking a leaf from the book of Dictator Joseph Stalin's Ogpu, Herr Himmler's men went into industrial centres as workmen, organized anti-Government demonstrations, watched carefully who responded. Soon the responding demonstrators landed in concentration camps.

Instead of a mere bodyguard for the Fuehrer, the 55 was enlarged into three general groupings having widely varying duties: the General 55, the Service Troops, the Death's Head Brigade. Membership in the General 55 implies no more than attendance at meetings, participation in political demonstrations, auxiliary police service on important occasions, sporting activity.

The other two groups devote their entire time to the organization and are paid regular salaries. The Service Troops include four battalions: the Leibstandarte, the Deutschland, the Germania, the Fuehrer. Of these, the Leibstandarte is best-known: its chief job is to guard Herr Hitler in Berlin and on all his trips. The other battalions are distributed throughout the Reich to form guards of honor for Nazi dignitaries, protect them during visits, control crowds and act as emergency troops. Motorized and equipped completely for warfare, they may well be the first to see action in the next war. They were honored by being among the first to invade Austria. They preceded Fuehrer Hitler in his "tour" last October of the Sudetenland to make sure that every town he entered was safe.

Not so much on display is the Death's Head Brigade, whose main job is to guard the concentration camps. Their activities have, however, caused much comment. When the Nazis took over in 1933 Herr Himmler established his first concentration camp near Dachau, Bavaria. There, 150 unemployed members of the SS guarded some 2,000 Communists, Social Democrats and assorted dissenters whose freedom was generally regarded as dangerous to the newborn State. By the time of the June purge in 1934, the number of "enemies of the State" had increased to 7,000 and new camps, at Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and near Weimar, were set up. Other smaller ones sprang up in Saxony, Silesia, Prussia.

Following Anschluss, 15,000 Austrians were deemed unfit to continue at liberty. The Jewish pogroms of last November which so shocked the world and which were directed personally by Gestapo Chief Himmler temporarily trebled the population of the already bulging camps. During the last few weeks some 20,000 arrests have been made in newly acquired Bohemia and Moravia.

The three big camps are now permanent prisons where Communist agitators, homosexuals, disgraced Nazis, Jewish university professors, Protestant conscientious objectors are thrown together in common cells. They wear coarse, striped uniforms, their heads are cropped, they shave only once weekly. The Jews wear yellow badges and the homosexuals pink, and few steps are taken to prevent Jewish adolescents from being attacked or molested.

Too many alumni have emerged from concentration camps with the same story to leave any further doubt that sadism and brutality are part & parcel of the concentration camp routine. The whipping post is used freely; men are forced to run while carrying heavy loads, are prodded by bayonets if they fall out of step. A sport of the guards is to throw Jewish boys into latrines and push their heads under with rifle butts.

The SS has grown by leaps & bounds until it is now an organization of 230,000, and an SS man is far more important, politically, than a soldier or a policeman. Indeed, due to the fact that Herr Himmler followed the romantic, mystical streak of Wotan-worship developed by old General Ludendorff, the SS has become the most elite and exotic body of cops the world has ever known. Defined as a "National Socialist soldierly order of Nordic men," the SS took many of their rules from the old Order of Teutonic Knights. Fundamental principles: loyalty, honor, courage. The SS cardinal virtue: blind obedience to orders.

The working 55--Service Troops and Death's Head Brigade--are not only entrusted with keeping German order but with producing a great race of supermen for puny Herr Himmler. 55 marriages--the bride's physical qualifications and racial background are thoroughly investigated--were once surrounded with Druidic ceremonies to impress the young couple with the ancient background of their Teutonic destiny. 55 colonies for young married couples are made attractive breeding grounds. Smart Herr Himmler has made his police service not only a service but a cult.

Himmler at Home. The Himmler villa is in Grunewald, suburb of Berlin. Not nearly so pretentious a residence as the Goering palace, the Goebbels Schwanenwerder estate or the Hitler Chancellery, it is quite as well guarded. A medical specialist summoned recently to examine Frau Himmler was reported to have had to submit credentials and answer questions to six different guards before arriving at her boudoir.

In the Reich's cast of stellar political actors Hermann Goering has usually been labeled Nazi No. 2, Dr. Goebbels No. 3. Herr Himmler would probably come fourth, but not necessarily so. No secret is it that he has aspired to the posts of Minister of the Interior and of War. He is intensely jealous of the Army officer group and last year went so far as to try to remove General Werner von Fritsch, then Commander-in-Chief of the Army, from his job by charging homosexuality. The General was ousted--for other reasons--but in the face of the plain truth that he was definitely not homosexual, the Army demanded and got General von Fritsch's public exoneration.

Many big Nazi editors and publishers are now strong Himmler men. Five Cabinet members have accepted the honorary 55 badge. Herr Himmler can perform important favors and no one can say him nay. His resources and funds are great. The fines he imposes, the money his men take from frontier smugglers, reportedly go into his organization. Well-informed people said the Jewish plunderings were to replenish the 55 and Gestapo coffers. His devotion to the Fuehrer has never been doubted; but neither can it be denied that the Fuehrer is deeply indebted to him. While Dr. Goebbels has played a spectacular but lone hand at propaganda and Field Marshal Goering Has been busy solving the economic needs of the Reich, Police Chief Himmler has been building with his 55 men and Gestapo a personal political machine. Some day in his climb to power he may skip a few rungs of the Nazi ladder>

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