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  War began in earnest on the first day of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. To Hitler’s dismay, Great Britain, followed by France, declared war on Germany, triggering a massive conflict well ahead of Hitler’s timetable. Unfortunately for the brave Polish soldiers and citizenry, their British and French allies offered little more than threatening words in response to the invasion. The Poles were subdued within a few weeks. With his eastern boundary secure Hitler cast his covetous gaze to the north in the spring of 1940, jabbing an armored fist into Denmark and Norway. France, meanwhile, refused to engage Germany from the west with its large and potent army, remaining instead safely ensconced behind the Maginot Line. Ever more confident, a few weeks later Hitler’s armies marched into the Netherlands, Belgium, and finally, France. The fall of the only continental power capable of standing up to Germany was breathtakingly swift. Within a few weeks Hitler’s Wehrmacht was standing on the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, his Luftwaffe soaring over the English Channel. England refused to come to terms. The Battle of Britain followed. The Luftwaffe, led ineptly by Hermann Göring, beat the courageous English down to one knee. To Hitler’s dismay, capitulation was not in the cards.

  Resigning himself to the fact that he was not strong enough to successfully invade the island nation, Hitler turned his attention to his ally, the Soviet Union. The decision to launch a massive attack in the east had been made years earlier. For Hitler, war with Stalin was unavoidable, and was driven by both a hatred of Bolshevism and a quest for resources, especially oil. But it was launched in the face of a spectacular failure of intelligence concerning the size, quality, and morale of the Russian forces. The assault, unleashed on June 22, 1941, was the largest offensive in history. The stunning, lightning-fast invasion swept the victorious German armies to the very suburbs of Moscow and marched hundreds of thousands of Russians into prisoner of war camps. Courageous resistance and a bitter early winter snow ended the drive without a decisive German victory. With Hitler’s massive army groups bogged down and freezing on the Russian steppes, the Japanese manufactured a blunder of similar proportion by attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Cobbled onto this double stroke of recklessness was yet a third major blunder—Hitler’s most serious strategic faux pas: he declared war on America. The declaration tilted American industrial and financial might onto the side of the embattled British and Russians, who rightly hailed both the Japanese attack and the Führer’s reckless response as a godsend.

  Unbeknownst to the world, Germany’s fortunes were nearing their apex. Gravity was about to glom onto Hitler’s grand design. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, with its associated Italian allies, experienced a few months of stunning success in 1942 in North Africa before suffering an equally striking series of reverses and ultimate defeat. The same pattern was repeated on the Eastern Front. Successful German air and land attacks tore titanic chunks of terrain from Mother Russia. Stiff Russian resistance and equally ferocious counter thrusts, however, eventually blunted and bloodied the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to a standstill. By late 1942, the Sixth German Army was trapped deep in Russia at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Hundreds of thousands of casualties and several weeks later Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered. More than 100,000 Germans marched into captivity; German fortunes in the East waned forever. While von Paulus’s men were fighting for their lives, German cities crumbled one by one under the relentless bombing campaign adopted by the Allies. Germany’s sea war, too, experienced staggering early success followed by stiffening resistance and, eventually, abysmal failure. The fear housed deep in the hearts and minds of the Allies lessened when new anti-submarine weapons in 1942 began taking their toll on Admiral Karl Dönitz’s U-boats. The breaking of the Enigma code and deployment of radar on aircraft and surface ships swung the pendulum decisively against Hitler’s Wolfpacks, which lost the all-critical Battle of the Atlantic just three months after the Stalingrad fiasco. “Black May” of 1943 saw more than forty U-boats dispatched to the bottom of the sea and drove the remainder back to their pens in France, Norway, and Germany. By June 6, 1944, the date the Allies invaded France at Normandy, it was manifest that Germany could no longer win the war.

  Operating in the wake of this colossal ship of combat and bloodshed were a handful of organizations and individuals tasked with objectives as odious as the men who implemented them. It is now time to introduce these men and their bureaucracies and explain who they were, where they came from, and how they operated.

  At the forefront, standing tall on the graves of millions, was Heinrich Himmler and his SS henchmen.

  Chapter 1

  “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people.”

  — Adolf Hitler

  The Devil’s Duo: Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Röhm

  Adolf Hitler was the most powerful man in Europe years before the United States entered World War II. His chosen successor, Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, was also one of Germany’s most dominant leaders. However powerful the former air ace was as the head of a mighty Luftwaffe at war—and notwithstanding his general corruptness and megalomania—Göring was forced to operate within the conventional framework of the armed forces, and all the restrictions that system entailed. He had stood side-by-side with Hitler during the Austrian’s climb to power, and was first in line in responsibility for victory in Poland and the Low Countries. But Göring’s fortunes rested upon a foundation of military successes. Humiliation over the skies of Britain and the humbling experience above the steppes of Russia dimmed his star.

  Two other dominant personalities also played an important role in the rise of Nazism and Adolf Hitler during the 1920s and 1930s. Their quasi-military organizations were not hampered by traditional bureaucratic niceties or other such impedimenta. Laws and tradition existed only to be broken and extinguished. Only one of the leaders survived to witness the outbreak of war in 1939. His star rose during the heady days of 1939–1941—and kept on rising as setbacks in the east and west mounted. His position within the Third Reich was less conspicuous than that of Göring’s, and the power he wielded was almost absolute.

  The character of one of the Nazi regime’s most brutal officers continues to fascinate historians. Despite his explicit and freely admitted responsibility for monstrous cruelty against his fellow man, the dichotomy that was Heinrich Himmler remains.

  Born in Munich on October 7, 1900, Himmler was the son of a pious authoritarian Roman Catholic schoolmaster who had once been tutor to the Bavarian Crown Prince. His early career in life was singularly unimpressive. Education during his formative years was taken in Landshut. While a teenager, he trained as an officer cadet and served with the 11th Bavarian Regiment, but did not see active service before the end of World War I. Unlike Hitler, however, Himmler did not outwardly manifest vehement infuriation at the harsh outcome imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Returning home, he entered Munich’s School of Technology in 1918 and emerged four years later with a degree in agriculture. The first few years of the 1920s passed quietly while Himmler labored as a fertilizer salesman and poultry farmer. Quiet, non-violent, and outwardly unemotional, the young man was described by one who knew him well as “an intelligent schoolmaster.” But inside that calm schoolmaster’s demeanor was something terribly wrong.

  By 1923 Himmler had acquired a deep interest in German politics. Setting aside his quiet life of agriculture, he participated in Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch and joined Ernst Röhm’s criminal paramilitary organization, the Reichskriegsflagge (Reich War Flag). By 1925 he was a full member of the Nazi party as well as the black-shirted SS (Schutzstaffeln), Hitler’s personal armed bodyguard. A succession of positions of power within the fledgling party were now open to him; promotions flew in his direction. In 1926 he became the party’s assistant propaganda leader. After marrying in 1927 and briefly returning to poultry farming, Hitler tapped him to run the SS, at that ti
me a small body comprised of about 200 men. The following year Himmler was elected as a Nazi Reichstag deputy. For the next three years he worked tirelessly on Hitler’s behalf, guaranteeing his own continued rise to power.

  After the Nazis seized the country’s political machinery in 1933, Himmler was appointed police president in Munich and head of the Bavarian political police. This authority and control gave Himmler exactly what he had been seeking for years: the power base to broaden and deepen his SS and organize the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, a separate ideological intelligence department within the SS under the command of Reinhard Heydrich. It also distanced him from Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung, or SA, Hitler’s paramilitary police. Himmler took the opportunity to set up the first concentration camp at Dachau, where political opponents and undesirables were housed in what was euphemistically called “protective custody.” Throughout these early years Himmler demonstrated an amazing organizational ability, especially with regard to the formation of political alliances within the Nazi hierarchy. The superficially cool officer was a survivor, an ambitious climber who craved power.1

  According to one author, Himmler used his new powers in 1933 to begin constructing a “state within the state,” a shadow government that answered to no one. Membership in his SS grew from 200 to more than 50,000 before the end of 1933. The ideology driving Himmler, and thus the SS, was an unhealthy preoccupation with religion, Nordic myths, and Aryan genealogy. As a result, the SS was constructed on the organized principles of the order of the Jesuits. The service statutes and spiritual exercises prescribed by Ignatius Loyola were emulated. Indeed, Himmler’s title, “Reichsführer,” was intended as the counterpart of the Jesuit’s General of Order. The complete structure of the SS leadership was adopted from Himmler’s studies of the hierarchic order of the Catholic Church. His domination expanded during this time when he secured the SS’s independence from control of Ernst Röhm’s SA, to which the SS was initially subordinated. Together with Reinhard Heydrich’s SD, Himmler continued his ceaseless labors to consolidate his power. In September 1933 he was made commander of all the political police units outside Prussia and, though formally still under Göring’s control, became head of the Prussian Police and Gestapo on April 20, 1934. Up until now Himmler’s rise within the party hierarchy had been little short of meteoric. Only one man stood in the way of his complete consolidation of power.

  Like Himmler, Ernst Röhm was also born in Munich. Other than their mutual association with Adolf Hitler, however, similarities were few and far between. Röhm served honorably in World War I. By the time Germany surrendered in 1918 he was the recipient of three combat wounds and held the rank of captain. Like so many men after that disastrous war, Röhm’s postwar goals were ill-defined at best. Yearning for structure he joined the Friekorps, a radical right-wing group of armed associations organized to defend the country’s borders against the threat of communist invasion. After participating in the Friekorps’s bloody slaughter of hundreds of communists and socialists in March 1919, Röhm steeped himself in nascent right-wing party politics. It was Röhm who secured the services of a young Adolf Hitler to spy on the German Worker’s Party (GWP), which Röhm soon joined. Like so many others, Röhm found Hitler to be a charismatic comrade. At his urging, Röhm led a group of armed storm troopers in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. Tried and found guilty of treasonable acts, Röhm escaped prison but was booted from the German army. Hitler was much smarter than Röhm. Instead of trying to defend himself on the few merits of his position, Hitler turned his trial into a political discourse that elevated his prestige even as he later languished in Landsberg prison.

  In these early years of the Nazi movement Röhm’s Brownshirts had been an indispensable element of Hitler’s success, a magnet that had attracted thousands of disaffected recruits into the Party. From within Landsberg the future leader of Germany came to realize that Röhm’s thirst for direct military confrontation with the German State was not the true course to power. He began to disassociate himself from a man he now viewed as an undesirable. Discarded by Hitler, Röhm withdrew from political life. The few jobs he held frustrated and bored him. Only an offer from Bolivia to serve as a military instructor preserved in Röhm some vestige of self worth. But history was not yet finished with the stocky native of Munich. The round chubby-faced ex-captain with a deep scar on one cheek, uneven mustache, and biting, porcine eyes, had one more act to play in the drama unfolding within Germany’s borders.2

  While Röhm toiled, Hitler plotted a new course for the SA. Shedding its paramilitary garb, Hitler honed the organization into a political weapon wholly subordinated to the NSDAP, or Nazi party. Hitler’s significant electoral victory in 1930 prompted him to recall Röhm as the SA’s chief of staff —though only after Hitler had assumed the position of Supreme Leader of the organization. Röhm rapidly expanded the SA into a popular army of street fighters, gangsters, and thugs. By 1934 the unemployed and disaffected swelled the ranks of the SA to several (loosely organized) millions. Röhm regarded this plebeian army of desperadoes as the core of the Nazi movement, the embodiment and guarantee of a permanent revolution. Under his leadership the SA fulfilled an indispensable role in Hitler’s rise to power between 1930 and 1933. Spreading propaganda and terror, Röhm’s brownshirts won the battle of the streets against the communists and other political opposition. As 1934 dawned, Röhm’s private army was as powerful as the German Army itself. But while Röhm was conquering the streets for Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany had again come full circle in his thinking: his SA chief was no longer necessary.

  Indeed the SA chief was now a threat to Hitler. Röhm had become disillusioned with the Nazi revolution. The growing bureaucratic Nazi movement angered Röhm, who dreamed of a “soldier’s state” and the primacy of the soldier over the politician. Provided a seat on the National Defence Council in 1933, Röhm vocalized his dissatisfaction over the use of his SA. In October he sent an ominous letter to Walther von Reichenau, the liaison officer between the German army and the Nazi Party. “I regard the Reichswehr [German army] now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in the future is the task of the SA.” Röhm insisted on maintaining momentum in a socialist direction while talking openly about the conquest of Germany. His populist demagogy alienated the middle class and the industrialists, whose support Hitler was still seeking and desperately needed. Röhm failed to understand Hitler’s concept of a gradual insurrection carried out under the cloak of legality. The real revolution, warned Röhm, was yet to come.

  If Hitler did not readily admit and recognize it, his chief supporters did: Röhm had to go. The head of the SA overplayed his hand by antagonizing two dangerous rivals, Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler. Both feared the SA leader, who was potentially strong enough to crush them. Both pressured Hitler to reduce his power and exposure by utilizing the SS and the Gestapo to do so. Röhm’s own conduct and that of his entourage, given to dissolute homosexual orgies and drinking bouts, loutish behavior, and wildly indiscreet remarks, made the task of his enemies that much easier. Still, Hitler hesitated. How could he eliminate his oldest comrade-in-arms, a man to whom he felt a debt of gratitude and a certain warmth—even though he had become a liability and even a danger to his regime?

  In goose-stepped Heinrich Himmler and his SS. Together with several officers of the German army, Himmler plotted Röhm’s spectacular demise. Heydrich, head of Himmler’s SD arm, was ordered to compile a damning dossier. The SA leader, Heydrich “discovered,” had accepted millions of marks from the French to launch a coup and oust Hitler. Hitler knew the record was untrue, but he saw the opportunity to finally be rid of Röhm—and seized it. Taken utterly by surprise, Röhm was arrested on June 30, 1934, in a private hotel at Bad Wiessee, a small Bavarian spa south of Munich where he was taking a holiday with other SA leaders. He was taken to Stadelheim prison, where he was executed two days later by firing squad after refusing t
o take his own life. It was an ironic end for the man who had once uttered, “All revolutions devour their own children.”3

  The bloody purge was kept secret until the middle of July, when Hitler mentioned the action during a speech and gave it a name that would resonate through history: “The Night of the Long Knives.” Hitler publicly branded Röhm a traitor and accused him of having fomented a nationwide plot to overthrow the government. “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people,” shouted Hitler in his explanation of why he did not use the German justice system to try Röhm. “I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason.” Hitler professed outrage at the homosexual aspects of Röhm and his criminal entourage, although the leader’s lifestyle had been well known and tolerated for many years. Scores and perhaps hundreds perished in the purge that both ended the influence of the SA and gained for Hitler the acceptance of the German officer corps and support of many industrialists. When President Paul von Hindenburg died five weeks later, the former World War I corporal became head of state.4