Gestapo by Edward Crankshaw

Author:Edward Crankshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cities and the American Revolution
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Gestapo Goes to War

The organization of tyranny in the occupied countries was elaborately conceived and prepared in fine detail before the outbreak of war. The German police, like every other Nazi institution, was put on a war footing in 1938, and the attachment to each Wehrkreis inside Germany of a Higher S.S. and Police Leader was a part of this development; for the Wehrkries, or military district, was to serve as the base for extraterritorial expansion.

Technically the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders were Himmler’s own representatives with the military commanders and the civil governors of their areas; but they varied very much from place to place in quality, character, and attack. As a rule they held the rank of S.S. general or major general. They were the hard core of the Nazi “old fighters,” and they ranged in background from the promoted sergeant-major to the dug-out retired officer who had decided to go in with the Nazis for reasons of idealism or expediency. On the whole they were tough and apt to be stupid and extremely heavy in the hand. They represented the victory of the S.S. over the civil administration, and they owed their positions to the desire of the Nazi leadership to reward the faithful for their services in the wilderness. By the professional policemen like Mueller, Nebe, Best, and others, who ran the Security Police—the Gestapo and the Kripo—they must have been regarded as a lot of blundering old men who had no comprehension of police matters—with certain notable exceptions, such as S.S. Lieutenant General Franz Jaeckeln and others of his colleagues in Poland and Russia, who by their energy and ruthlessness set an example even to the Security Police and the S.D.

To the bright young men of the S.D. they must have appeared as denizens of another world. But character and opportunity counted for a good deal and although there were undoubtedly a number of Higher S.S. and Police Leaders who were not active or interfering and hardly knew what was going on, and although there were others who were simply corrupt in a rather elephantine manner and chiefly concerned with loot, the most energetic among them were fully worthy of the organization they were privileged to adorn and succeeded in having a finger in very many pies.

Their opportunities varied with the nature of the problems presented by their particular commands. In Denmark, for example, S.S. Colonel Bovensiepen was not much more than a repressive chief constable, often at loggerheads with the emissaries of the Gestapo and S.D. In Russia, on the other hand, where the front was far from static and there was much partisan warfare, men like von dem Bach-Zelewski, Jaeckeln, Herff, and Pruetzmann took their jobs very seriously, acted in liaison between Himmler and the Army, and entered with determination and enthusiasm into their task of terrorizing the back areas, and massacring Jews, Commissars, and other undesirables.

In Poland outside the annexed areas, in the General Government that is, where an extremely

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