Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

724 DER FUEHRERMay, 1933, Goring had flatly forbidden his police officials to belong tothe S.A. or the S.S. (or even the Steel Helmets); in the beginning ofAugust he took an unusual step and sent the whole SA. and S.S.auxiliary police home. This was the treatment accorded the 'old fighters'who had conquered power for Hitler and Goring. In helpless rage Rohmexclaimed on Tempelhof Field: 'Those who think that the task of theS.A. has been accomplished will have to accept the fact that we are hereand intend to stay here.' They were here 'to suppress the defeated enemyand, if need be, exterminate him.' And he would not let anyone gainsayhim in this matter.This — among other things — was a conflict between the state andthe party over the right to practice terrorism. The Third Reich could notendure without using force against a part of its citizens, without at leastfrightening the others and threatening all of them. This state was alwayshovering on a wave of inflamed emotion, whether of enthusiasm or offear. The S.A. considered terrorism its monopoly; but on May 3, Goringhad created a government agency for the purpose of exerting terrorism,and given it the name of Secret State Police (Geheime Staats-Polizei,abbreviated Gestapo). This police was explicitly charged with thosetasks which only a few months before had been considered unlawfularbitrary acts stricdy forbidden by the constitution, and which, for thatreason, seemed reserved to the S.A. Henceforward the Gestapo, withoutany individual orders from above, had the right to exercise the exceptionalpowers against people's lives, freedom, and property whichthe Third Reich had granted itself on the night of the Reichstag fire.Moreover, it was not a National Socialist to whom Goring had giventhese extraordinary powers, at least not an 'old fighter' known to theparty — it was the same Councillor Werner Diels who had oncebetrayed his State Secretary Abegg to von Papen. At first the Gestapohad authority only in Prussia. It must be said that throughout Germanythere had always been a 'political police' — an institution as old ashistory itself; in the French Republic it was more powerful thanParliament; in Tsarist Russia it had forged The Protocols of the WiseMen of Zion, in Bolshevist Russia it was one of the pillars of the state.In the Weimar Republic, it had not been