An Honourable Defeat Read Free Page A

agents were not always intelligent, though of course the system threw up evil geniuses in the upper ranks like Reinhard Heydrich and Walter Schellenberg. They relied on a system of informers and on denunciation, not detection, to make their arrests. They tapped telephones and infiltrated suspect groups as fifth columnists and agents provocateurs . Once arrested, a victim might well have information tortured out of him — increasingly so as the regime progressed — or he might be thrown into a concentration camp for a few years. Dachau was opened as early as March 1933 for political undesirables.
    Those arrested in the early days by the regular courts might find themselves acquitted or sent to an ordinary prison for a short term, only to be picked up by the Gestapo on their release and summarily ‘disappeared’ into the camps. One lawyer was arrested because his name — he was located by the Gestapo through the expedient of looking him up in the telephone book — was the same as that given to the man they were really after in a recently published roman - à - clef .
    Another example of early Gestapo methods, which borders on black farce (as do many matters in the history of the Third Reich), is given by Hans Bernd Gisevius, the civil servant who joined the Gestapo as a lawyer as part of his normal career structure, but who became one of the earliest and most dedicated members of the Resistance. It deals with the fate of a petty criminal, Rall, who was implicated in the murder of the notorious early Nazi, Horst Wessel, himself a pimp and small-time crook, who was elevated to the Nazi pantheon by Goebbels after his death:
    After it [the hearing] was over, the prisoner was taken out of the police lock-up by night, stripped of all his clothes except his shirt, and driven out of the city. The car stopped at what seemed to be a favourable spot. The rest of the story was eloquently told to me by one of the murderers, a man named Reineking, who later ended in a concentration camp for knowing too much and talking too loosely. Near a small forest they saw an open field, and nearby there was a bench. They forced Rall to sit down on this bench, and then they choked him to death. According to Reineking’s story, it took ages before their victim died; at any rate, the murderers felt that each minute was an hour.
    Then they left the body sitting on the bench and set about digging a grave in the field. But imagine their horror when they suddenly heard a noise, turned around, and saw their ‘corpse’ running away. The sight of this dead man racing along in the bright moonlight, his shirt fluttering behind him, was terrifying even to these hard-boiled SA [sic — the two men have previously been referred to as Gestapo] killers.
    But the murderers’ dread that they would be discovered out-weighed their terror. They rushed after the corpse, and this time really choked him to death. Then they hastily buried him. We can easily believe Reineking when he reported that he and his accomplice were very uneasy when they were called to account about the matter by the following noon.
    There are certain impressions one never forgets. This description of Rall’s murder is one of those for me. Although, in later days, I heard thousands of more horrible tales, this ghostly scene repeatedly rises before my eyes: the automobile roaring through the countryside, the moonlit night, the man in the shirt...the ghastliness of the whole story is so vivid that I feel it a chronicler’s duty to recount it...’ [8]
    The SA barely bothered to arrest people, though they had their own system of barracks and semi-official prisons, where brutal torture of opponents took place, usually Communists and other left-wingers in the very early days. One infamous incident occurred in the Silesian village of Potempa in August 1932. Konrad Pietzuch was a Communist sympathiser, and when five of his workmates who were members of the SA took exception to this, they kicked him to