Foundations of the Nazi Police State

The Formation of Sipo and SD

George C. Browder

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813182735
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

A comprehensive study of the lesser-known organizations that formed the heart of the Nazi police state in World War II Germany. The abbreviation "Nazi, " the acronym "Gestapo, " and the initials "SS" have become resonant elements of our vocabulary. Less known is "SD, " and hardly anyone recognizes the combination "Sipo and SD." Although Sipo and SD formed the heart of the National Socialist police state, the phrase carries none of the ominous impact that it should. Although no single organization carries full responsibility for the evils of the Third Reich, the SS-police system was the executor of terrorism and "population policy" in the same way the military carried out the Reich's imperialistic aggression. Within the police state, even the concentration camps could not rival the impact of Sipo and SD. It was the source not only of the "desk murderers" who administered terror and genocide by assigning victims to the camps, but also of the police executives for identification and arrest, and of the command and staff for a major instrument of execution, the Einsatzgruppen. Foundations of the Nazi Police State offers the narrative and analysis of the external struggle that created Sipo and SD. This book is the author's preface to his discussion of the internal evolution of these organizations in Hitler's Enforcers: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution. "A welcome addition to the literature on National Socialist Germany." — American Historical Review "Sheds new light on Himmler's role in the complex web of the Nazi police state." — Publishers Weekly "[The book] makes major changes in our understanding of the structure and functioning of the Nazi police state." — Canadian Journal of History "This is the first comprehensive study of how the Gestapo and all other detective police came to be united under the Sipo (Security Police) and tied to the SD (The Security Services of the Party and SS)." — Educational Book Review "The work fills an important gap in the literature on the Third Reich." — The Historian

1

Factionalism in Pursuit of Power

The Nazi Movement to 1931

The struggle for police power at the higher levels of the Nazi Party culminated in 1936 with Himmler’s triumph: the addition of the title chief of the German Police to his National Socialist power base as Reichsfuehrer of the SS. It was in June 1936 that he created Sipo—the German Reichs Security Police—and added it to Reinhard Heydrich’s command over the SD, the SS Security Service of the NS Movement. At that point, the foundations of the Nazi police state were firmly laid, and the agencies for controlled police terror, and ultimately genocide, were in place. Until then, however, neither Himmler’s triumph nor the nature and structure of the Nazi police state were foregone conclusions. Its ultimate missions of totalitarian terror and genocide exceeded the imaginations of even its creators. The developments that culminated in Himmler’s triumph began several years before Hitler became chancellor in 1933.

The early National Socialist Movement was neither monolithic nor disciplined. By 1930, when the Nazis first became a significant political party, the Movement contained diverse, competitive, contradictory groups with one thing in common: a bond of powerful loyalty to their Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. Each member and each faction of the Movement adhered to some variant of the Nazi Idea, or Weltanschauung, and each thought his version most closely followed Hitler’s. No one ever knew for sure, however, for, unlike an ideology, his Weltanschauung was almost deliberately vague, with only one ideological certainty: the existence of the Fuehrer, the one leader who embodied the Weltanschauung and the true will of the people.¹

To exert the widest popular appeal and to maintain his personal power, Hitler kept the Nazi Idea vague and all-encompassing, allowing each faction some leeway to push its own preferences. As conditions changed, the propaganda themes shifted to attract those groups temporarily more susceptible to the promises of Nazism. Parallel to its clearly conservative, anti-communist appeal, National Socialism could be both elitist and egalitarian, and ambivalent about private property. But always there was the safe appeal to nationalism, usually chauvinistic and xenophobic, interwoven with virulently anti-Semitic theories. Even this anti-Semitism, however, could vary greatly in both emphasis and intensity.

In juxtaposition to its vaguely defined socialism, National Socialism called for the restoration of selected old values, traditions, and institutions, including the authority of German society. While this was basically a reactionary attitude, for many only a radical revolutionary restructuring of society could restore those lost values. Thus reactionaries and radicals came together in common focus on a strong personal leader as the source of authority in society.

The vague NS Idea fused contradictory factions into a Movement that gave Hitler power as the ultimate authority on the Idea, never to be clearly defined. Generally, he stood above factional disputes and power struggles, committing himself to a position only when absolutely forced to—and then adroitly managing to leave all parties with some hope, some pittance, preserving his position as the ultimate arbiter. Only when a follower inadvertently tried to crystallize the Weltanschauung into a reality that would limit Hitler’s freedom and authority would he bring such a man down.

Ideological ambiguity as a basis for personal authority related closely to Hitler’s tactic of divide and conquer. Just as he avoided identification with the position of any one faction, he also restricted the development of any clear chains of command or order of rank within the Movement, never favoring any one leader or faction without counterbalance. Frequently he created overlapping or conflicting responsibilities and refused to delineate spheres of influence. How much of this was a calculated tactic and how much merely a product of his reluctance to make decisions remains unclear, but the effect was the same. Each in his command vied with the other for the favor and support of a man who always stood above, withholding the ultimate favor and thus rarely having to fear an alliance of subordinates against him. Because each lieutenant, with his own interpretation of what Hitler had said, built agencies and organizations that he thought would best fulfill the goals of the Movement, Hitler always had a wide variety of instruments to use and courses to pursue, usually maintaining several alternatives simultaneously.²

The pecking order within the Movement resulted from whatever personal power a lieutenant might be able to muster, and his momentary suitability or indispensability to Hitler’s quest. Consequently power relationships among the Nazis have been aptly compared to feudalism,³ being based on individual strengths and complex interpersonal relationships. Because most of Hitler’s vassals were lords or little fuehrers in their own domains, each having his own personal following, the Movement and the Third Reich were neither rational nor monolithic, but became instead confusing webs of personal power and loyalty systems. Unlike the feudal lord, however, Hitler always maintained the right to interfere if he saw fit.

Although such intraparty relationships were nurtured by Hitler’s character and methods, they also reflected the coalescent growth of the Movement. Even after July 1921, when he had become the almost undisputed leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP, Hitler’s supporters remained indistinct from the amorphous, voelkisch right wing of Bavarian politics. Also part of this right wing were the ubiquitous paramilitary groups, some of which fused into the Storm Troopers, or Brown Shirts (Sturmabteilung, known as the SA).

The SA, born in the summer of 1921 as the paramilitary wing of the Party, would become one of Hitler’s first factional problems. Its allegiances were unclear, and many of its members–former soldiers and their youthful followers—visualized the creation of a military society based on a new national army that would replace the decadent Prussian traditions with the spirit of trench camaraderie. Since a new order built by the SA would simply bring Hitler along with it rather than vice versa, he insisted that his new order must be built before the national army could emerge. Until then, the paramilitary wing had to remain an instrument of the political mission and subordinate to the Party, that is, to Hitler.

In addition to the SA, other factions emerged as problems. After the 1923 putsch, the outlawed Nazi Party had fragmented into groups operating under camouflaged names, becoming a national force in northeastern and western Germany, where Nazism had previously been weak. One offspring was the so-called Northern Faction, a group centered around the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, Joseph Goebbels, and others. Most of them leaned much more toward anticapitalism than did the more conservative Bavarian-centered branch.⁴

Such divisiveness face Hitler in 1925 when he left Landsburg Prison and began to reorganize the NSDAP. His efforts were twofold. First, he reestablished his personal contacts and power, welding the Movement together by emphasizing the common themes of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the beloved but absolute Fuehrer. Second, he mandated a complete reorganization and centralization of the Party from its Munich headquarters down to the local Pary organizations. In his major thrust against divided loyalties, he terminated all overlapping links with other voelkisch and paramilitary groups.

By dividing and conquering and by wooing many recalcitrants with a mixture of overwhelming showmanship, flattery, and unyielding insistence on his preeminence, Hitler adroitly patched over the cracks while denying the radicals a hard-line position. Nevertheless, he did not deny the specific ideological views of the Northern Faction, and left the future so vague that the faction and its leaders remained almost intact. Anything could still be read between the lines of the Party program and Hitler’s statements.

Meanwhile, the SA reemerged as a rebel. During the reorganization, local Party leaders had established their own SA units. The numerous independent SA leaders and local units tended to act autonomously, and the SA attracted an increasingly rowdy and uncontrollable element. To centralize command, Hitler appointed Franz von Pfeffer Supreme SA Fuehrer in October 1926. Although Pfeffer developed a national command structure for the SA, provincial leadership prevailed over efforts to establish a military hierarchy. The SA remained diverse in membership and perhaps more untrustworthy than any of the other factions, often becoming synonymous with the more radically anitcapitalist, antiestablishment elements in the Movement. Aggravating the situation, Pfeffer favored an autonomous military force over subordination to the Party.⁵

The result of the evolution was an ever-increasing diversity that was essential to building the mass-based party that Hitler would ride to power. The central Party bureaucracy sought to impose Party discipline for its Fuehrer, but even the bureaucracy was factionalized under lieutenants who built personal structures for executing their own interpretations of the Fuehrer’s will. Below them, at every level across Germany, local fuehrers emerged, each equally sure that his approach embodied the true NS Idea and the Fuehrer’s will. Each resented either the bureaucratic inflexibility or the undisciplined willfulness of the other.

Ironically, this tension did not produce a badly factionalized party, but instead a flexible, dynamic Movement, bound together in xenophobic nationalism and a powerful focus on common enemies. An outward show of discipline and comradely unity in the face of those enemies became the proper NS stance. Above all, Party members united behind their Fuehrer, who could convert their tension into political power. This capacity made the Movement and Adolf Hitler synonymous, but has left open the question of when and how much he controlled the Movement, or it drove him.

Himmler and the SS

Into this context of factionalism and questionable reliability of large branches of the Movement came the SS. Hitler’s chauffeur, Julius Schreck, created the first true SS prototype in April 1925, when he formed the eight-man Staff Guard for the Fuehrer, who was then uncertain about his ability to keep the SA as a subordinate wing of the Party.⁶ Hitler, just released from prison and finding the Party in turmoil and the SA uncontrolled, needed personal protection and a disciplined, absolutely reliable Party police force. The eight-man Staff Guard became the model for many such units at local Party offices, soon designated Schutzstaffeln (Protection Squadrons), known as the SS.

From the beginning, the SS units resembled an elite formation: small, handpicked teams, not to exceed ten men—allegedly the best and most reliable Party members. To guard against disorderly, insubordinate elements, the screening process required of each SS candidate two sponsors and registration with the police as a resident of the local area for at least five years. Increasingly stringent physical requirements also added to the image of eliteness.

During its first years, the SS developed its mission as a security service, protecting Party leaders and speakers and, beyond that, policing within the Movement. To perform this mission, the SS soon developed its first intelligence function by requiring its members to forward to SS headquarters all newspaper and magazine clippings referring to the Movement, as well as information on undesirables and spies in the Party.⁷

No sooner had the SS begun to develop, however, than it lost its initial preeminence. When Pfeffer reorganized the SA in the fall of 1926, the nascent SS had to take a back seat. Not only did the newly designated Reichsfuehrer SS become subordinate to the Supreme SA Fuehrer, but the local SS units drew increasingly menial assignments as the SA reemerged.⁸ The little SS remained insignificant until it came under the command of Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler had joined the SS in 1925, as member number 168. At that time, as secretary and general assistant to Gregor Strasser, head of the Party District, or Gau, of Lower Bavaria, his duties included organizing and commanding the local protection squadrons. A diligent worker, he rose rapidly in the Party, and during the next year, when Strasser became propaganda chief at Party central headquarters, Himmler became deputy chief. In this position, he developed a closer relationship with the SS, which as an intelligence agency collaborated with him in propaganda and as a protection force guarded the speakers whom he furnished. In September 1927, Himmler consequently became second in command of the SS.⁹.

Immediately, he strengthened the intelligence functions of the SS by requiring that intelligence reports from the local squadrons be forwarded regularly to his central headquarters. He expanded the scope of these reports to include unusual news about (1) opponents, especially their leaders; (2) known...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Factionalism in Pursuit of Power
• 2. The Roots of the SD
• 3. The Weimar Police
• 4. Plans, Preparations, Penetrations
• 5. Prussian Beginnings
• 6. Himmler in Bavaria
• 7. The Vortex of Intrigue
• 8. The SD Emergent
• 9. Toward Command of a Reich Political Police
• 10. Acquiring the Prussian Power Base
• 11. The SD and Conservative Opposition
• 12. The Roehm Purge
• 13. The Conservative Counterattack
• 14. The Selling of the Police State
• 15. The Military Factor
• 16. Persistent Opposition
• 17. A Conservative Victory?
• 18. Himmler’s Triumph
• 19. The Formation of Sipo and SD
• Appendix. Comparative Officer Ranks
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index to First Citations
• General Index