Gestapo Read Online Free PDF Page A

formed.
    Certainly Heydrich was surprised, angry, and disgruntled when he found himself out of a job and with a broken career. Certainly this drove him earlier than otherwise into that haven of the resentful and disgruntled, the infant S.S. Certainly it was in the Hamburg branch headquarters that Himmler found him, his attention having been directed to the enlistment of a new member who had been an officer if not a gentleman and who knew how to read and write—who had, moreover, been employed in Naval Intelligence. Certainly, sensing which way the tide was running, and observing that Himmler’s preoccupation with racial purity, at least as regards physical appearance, was filling the S.S. with a remarkable collection of fair-haired morons, Heydrich saw his opportunity. But he had the ability as well. And he was one of those very few born leaders who have the boldness and the confidence to surroundthemselves not with sycophants but with the cleverest men they can find.
    Himmler took him to Munich and confided to him a pet project. The S.S. was all very well as a
corps d’élite
of guards; but it needed to be more than that. If the S.S. was to be the fountainhead of German manhood it had to impose itself as a minority power on the sprawling, brawling shape of revolutionary Germany. It needed a highly organized intelligence system, and Reinhard Heydrich was the obvious man to create it. Heydrich thought so too.
    He took his new assignment in a very broad sense. The drilling and recruitment of the S.S. could be left to those who liked that sort of thing. He would provide its brains. He decided quite soon that it was easier to turn brilliant young men after his own heart into useful S.S. officers by offering them careers which they could not hope to make elsewhere, than to turn the existing membership of the S.S. into brilliant young men with the brains and character to carry out the tasks envisaged for them. So he proceeded to build up a
corps d’élite
within the S.S., just as Himmler was already building up the S.S. as a
corps d’élite
within the S.A. The basis of this body was known as the S.S.
Sicherheitsdienst
, or Security Service, called hereafter by its initials the S.D. And to the end of its history the S.D. remained a purely S.S. organization, playing no official part in the apparatus of State, although, when Himmler took over the Prussian Gestapo (not as leader of the S.S., but as a police officer under Goering), the S.D. became in theory the long arm, or intelligence service, of the Gestapo, and later became inextricably merged with it.
    The two men, Himmler and Heydrich, made indeed a terrible combination. With the advent of Hitler to power and his immediate domination of Prussia they represented the strength of the Nazi movement in Bavaria, and with their rapidly developing organization played a major part in carrying out the
coup d’état
after the March elections which secured Munich for Hitler. During those two months neither Himmler nor Heydrich had official Government standing: their sole authority was the power of the S.S. Nor was Himmler, much less Heydrich, his very young lieutenant, a member of the inner Nazi circle. He had no pretensions to high office. And, indeed, when the BavarianGovernment was overthrown, Himmler contented himself with asking for the post of Chief of Police in Munich, which he received.
    We shall probably never know whether it was Himmler or Heydrich who hit on the idea of getting control of the police, first of Bavaria, then of all Germany. Himmler himself was so preoccupied with the organization and recruitment of the S.S. and his dreams for a knightly order that it was probably Heydrich, restless and thrusting. But Himmler had thoughts of his own. His administrative skill and his romantic visions dwelt in rigorously separated compartments, and he was never blinded by passion in the conduct of his intrigues. Heydrich, although he prided himself on his