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

THE BLOOD PURGE 743voted to him personally, but dubious, to say the least, from the point ofview of the party and its Fuhrer. What seemed particularly objectionablewas that Rohm's collaborators were in part men unknown in themovement; that their patron had chosen them for personal reasons, andthat therefore they placed their personal loyalty to him above everythingelse. Actually Goring and Goebbels had always done the same thing —it would have been inconceivable if they had done otherwise; evenHitler himself had done it — thus, in April, 1934, he had gotHindenburg to appoint his translator, Joachim von Ribbentrop, 'deputyin disarmament problems,' thus making him, over Rosenberg's head, thefirst National Socialist expert on foreign politics.At first, as he himself later admitted, Hitler ignored all theseaccusations. But the S.A. themselves suffered from the widening wedgewhich Hitler had deliberately driven into them from the beginning —and now this was to prove one of his shrewdest and most far-reachingmeasures. Outwardly, the Black S.S. was still subjected to Rohm'ssupreme command; among the S.S. leaders Himmler still appeared asone of the S.A. leaders; and when the old fighters grumbled andthreatened publicly, Himmler was among the loudest of them. Thissituation continued seemingly undisturbed until well into May; it was asthough the old fighters had triumphed — and perhaps they had when, atthe beginning of April, Goring was forced to dismiss Werner Diels, hischief of the secret state police, and once a very useful traitor, andreplace him by Heinrich Himmler. Himmler was already chief of the'political police' in all the German states while remaining Reich leaderof the S.S.; now he was given the strongest police machine in the Reichand he merged it, with the help of his collaborator, Reinhard Heydrich,with the police organizations of the other German states. Staffed byselected S.S. men, permeated with their silent arrogance and coldindifference toward humanity, this police body gradually became themost frightful organization of its kind in modern history.The meaning of such shifts of power as Himmler's promotion to thepost of chief of the Gestapo is rarely as clear at the moment to thepersons most closely involved as it is later to outside ob-