Himmler takes over the political police

By the spring of 1934 Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, had become something in Germany that would have been hard to imagine a year earlier: commander of the political police of almost all the states (Länder) of the Reich. He had started in March 1933 as acting police president of Munich, and within little more than a year, state by state, he had gathered into his hands control of the apparatus that watched, arrested and sent the regime’s opponents to the camps. Only Prussia, the largest state of the Reich, was missing; there the political police, the Gestapo, was run by Hermann Göring. The fusion of the political police with the SS laid the foundations of the Third Reich’s police state and created the instrument with which, a few months later, Hitler dealt with his own comrades.

20 March or 20 April

Some chronologies state that as early as 20 March 1934 “all police forces in Germany” were placed under Himmler’s command. That statement needs correcting on two counts. First, it concerned only the political police, not the police as a whole: the ordinary uniformed police, the criminal police and the gendarmerie remained subordinate to the interior ministers of the individual states, and in Prussia to Göring and his trusted associate Kurt Daluege, who headed the police in the Prussian Interior Ministry. Second, the sources point to no law or decision of 20 March announcing any such change. Historians’ studies and German sources describe a process spread over time: between the autumn of 1933 and January 1934 Himmler became commander of the political police in one German state after another, until only Prussia and tiny Schaumburg-Lippe remained beyond his reach. The decisive step came only on 20 April 1934, when Himmler took control of the Prussian Gestapo; he became head of the whole German police on 17 June 1936. It is therefore 20 April, not 20 March, that marks the moment when the political police of the whole of Germany passed into Himmler’s hands.

From Munich to the German states

The Weimar Republic had no national police force. Policing was a matter for the states: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg and a dozen or so smaller ones. After Hitler came to power and the Reichstag fire, the Nazis took over the state police forces one after another. The Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 suspended basic civil rights and allowed people to be held without trial in so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft). Whoever controlled the political police decided who would be taken into such custody.

In Bavaria that power was won by Himmler. On 9 March 1933 he became acting police president of Munich, and on 20 March he announced the establishment of the Dachau concentration camp. From 1 April, as “Political Police Commander of Bavaria”, he headed the Bavarian Political Police, which had been separated from the regular police. He entrusted its day-to-day running to the head of his intelligence service, the SD, the former naval officer Reinhard Heydrich. Bavaria produced the model Himmler wanted to extend to the whole of Germany: a political police removed from the control of the courts and the administration, run by SS men and with its own system of camps.

His opportunity came from the rivalry of others. The Reich Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, wanted to bring the police forces of all the states under his own authority and build a centralised state. Göring, Prime Minister and Interior Minister of Prussia, defended his Prussian domain and in April 1933 separated the Secret State Police from the Prussian police, putting Rudolf Diels at its head. Himmler exploited this conflict. He won over the Reich governors and Gauleiters in one state after another and from the autumn of 1933 took over, state by state, the post of political police commander, from large states such as Saxony and Württemberg down to the smallest. Everywhere he organised the political police on the Bavarian model and staffed it with SS men. On 30 January 1934 the Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich stripped the states of their sovereignty and transferred their sovereign rights to the Reich. The state police forces ceased to be independent institutions, and the way to a single apparatus lay open.

Prussia

The last obstacle was Prussia, home to more than three-fifths of all Germans. Göring was long unwilling to give up the Gestapo, but in the spring of 1934 his calculation changed. His most dangerous rival within the movement – as for the army and for Himmler – had become the SA Chief of Staff, Ernst Röhm, whose paramilitary force, millions strong, was demanding a “second revolution” and the replacement of the Reichswehr. Diels, a civil servant with no base in the party, did not seem to Göring ruthless enough to take on the SA, while the SS, though formally still part of the SA, had leaders with their own reasons for wanting Röhm out of the way. At the beginning of April Diels was dismissed, and on 20 April 1934 Göring appointed Himmler inspector and deputy head of the Prussian secret police. Göring remained its nominal head, but real power now lay with Himmler. On 22 April Heydrich took charge of the Secret State Police Office in Berlin, and men from the Bavarian Political Police moved into its headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, among them Heinrich Müller, later head of the Gestapo within the Reich Security Main Office. In November 1934 Göring handed over the running of the Prussian Gestapo to Himmler as his sole responsibility.

Thus in the spring of 1934 the political police of the whole of Germany, the party intelligence service (the SD) and the concentration camps came under a single leadership. An apparatus had been created that was not yet formally a single office, but functioned as one.

The first task

Himmler’s new power was soon put to use. From April the SD and the Gestapo gathered material against Röhm and the SA leaders, and in June they prepared fabricated evidence that the SA was plotting a coup. When Hitler struck on 30 June 1934, SS and Gestapo men arrested and murdered according to lists drawn up in Berlin and Munich. The political police, which only a year earlier had been split among a dozen or so state offices, proved an efficient instrument of murder at the leader’s command.

Significance

Himmler’s takeover of the political police was one of the most important steps in building the Nazi state, even though it was accompanied by no ceremony and no single spectacular date. The political police, which in Germany had always been part of the state administration, bound by law and supervised by ministers, became the domain of a party formation answerable only to Himmler and Hitler. The principle that Heydrich’s deputy, Werner Best, later formulated – that the Gestapo’s actions were not subject to review by the courts as long as it was carrying out the will of the leadership – grew directly out of these months.

The process was completed in June 1936, when Hitler appointed Himmler “Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police”, making him head of the uniformed and criminal police as well. The criminal police and the Gestapo were merged into the Security Police under Heydrich, and on 27 September 1939, during the war against Poland, the Security Police and the SD formed the Reich Security Main Office. This apparatus produced the Einsatzgruppen, which from the first days of the war murdered the Polish intelligentsia and from 1941 the Jews in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, and the officials who organised the deportations to the extermination camps. The road to them began with the quiet replacement of men in the posts of police commanders in the German states in the winter of 1933 and the spring of 1934.