The Perfect Nazi by Martin Davidson

Author:Martin Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Their most dangerous heresy, however, was to believe that it was possible to enjoy the benefits of the Third Reich without enslaving themselves to the Führer. They were at best provisional Nazis, delighted with their newly empowered German Reich, but unwilling to jeopardize hard-won social and economic status in pursuit of war and racial empire building. To the Nazi purist, they were worse than backstabbers, they were backsliders, men who sought to hold back the Third Reich not by sabotage, but by relapsing into their old, comfortable ways. Just when Hitler wanted the Third Reich to embark on its decisive next chapter, these men, bloated with complacency, threatened to rein him in. He was having none of it. Bruno’s Amt II/123, far from being a backwater, was in fact located right on top of Nazi Germany’s most important internal battle line, responsible for monitoring what was, by 1937, the last source of plausible opposition to Hitler. Unlike Jews and Masons, who were in reality powerless, and whose threat to the Nazis was pure delusion, the reluctant right did control a formidable proportion of German infrastructure.

Bruno had spent years inhabiting far-right völkisch nationalist circles. He knew these men and their organizations intimately and could spot conservative dissidence from a mile away. Bruno’s father had steeped him in their ways of thinking, having been a long-term sympathizer with a number of veterans’ groups.34 He therefore had little trouble getting his feet under his new SD desk, one of a team of specialists dedicated to protecting the integrity of Hitler’s authority, backed up by the awesome power of the SS. For the first time in his life, this must have offered Bruno a taste of real power. All those men on the right wing, the patricians, the senior officers, Germany’s upper class, were now accountable to a small team of intelligence officers, which included Bruno the thirty-one-year-old dentist and long-term Party member. Any grandee deluded enough to entertain misgivings about Nazi policy now had to run the gauntlet of the SD, in the shape of men like Bruno (or Klaus Barbie, future head of the Gestapo in wartime France, recruited to Amt II/123 at the same time as him, though not to the same Berlin office). Bruno had won the trust of the most powerful men in the Reich and was now acting in their name.

Joining the SD represented the high point of Bruno’s Nazi activism; what had begun hot, violent, physical, and indiscriminate had turned into something very different: cool, objective, rational, and hard. These were the watchwords for the new generation of Nazi functionaries to which Bruno now belonged.35 Like him, they had matured in their application of violence. Early Nazis had distinguished “fist” from “head”; they had always maintained (disingenuously) that violence and politics were separate things. This was no longer true. For the SS, and especially the SD, violence had been sublimated into the quiet but deadly discipline of the bureaucrat. Too important to be left with the thugs, calculated violence informed the Nazi state at its highest levels.

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