Himmler’s dark vision

By summer 1934, the German political opposition was largely broken. The Nazi movement was in control and Hitler the undisputed ruler of Germany. But SS leader Himmler wanted brutal repression to continue. He strongly opposed the mass releases of political opponents which had almost emptied the early camps. As he told German state councillors on 5 March 1936, the battle against Germany’s opponents had only just begun. It could only be won by total terror: Himmler’s police would arrest suspects and his SS would isolate them in concentration camps.

011 – Confidential speech by Heinrich Himmler in spring 1936

The method of the first weeks and months, of the first year [of Nazi rule], was improvised since what mattered first of all was to settle the hash of an opponent who was active in the street. The brutal violence of the red partisans had to be opposed by an equally brutal violence of the state and the Movement. […] In the course of 1934 came the time when we, in German decency – if I may say so – [completely] misjudging the adversary cleared the concentration camps except for a negligible number [of prisoners]. […]

The belief that the political struggle against the adversaries – Jewry, Bolshevism, worldwide Freemasonry and all the forces that do not want a newly risen Germany – is over is, in my opinion, a grave error, for Germany stands only at the beginning of what may well be a conflict lasting centuries, perhaps the decisive worldwide conflict with those forces of organized subhumanity. I would even say that we, our generation, also in this respect, can only give the Political Police and the state’s fighters against the worldwide political adversary the beginning, the foundation, the tradition which then, over the centuries, as an enduring institution, will enable Germany to be victorious in its struggle. […]

a conflict lasting centuries

The adversary:
may I now explain to you in rough outline how we view the adversary for the struggle against whom we believe that we need the apparatus and institution of the Secret State Police. I would like to go back to what I said at the beginning of my address about the struggle against Communism and against the enemies of the state in the year 1933/34. I said at the end of my characterization that his methods have changed and I also emphasized that I regarded the release of the Communist prisoners as a wrong political move. I believe we Germans make a serious mistake inasmuch as we are measuring the political adversary by our own decent yardsticks. Thus we believe, for instance, that a political adversary whom we have released would regard this as a sign of decency and would therefore no longer undertake anything because he would somehow feel obliged to us, because he felt he had to be grateful to us that, as a leading Communist, he was not executed by firing squad […]

This chivalrous attitude, however, must be seen as madness if applied to Jewry or to Bolshevism, which have immorality, fraud and lies as a prerequisite of its political struggle and which, according to a typically Jewish principle, regards any non-annihilation of the opponent as weakness. […] All in all it should be stated here that we Germans must at long last learn that the Jew and any organization trained by Jews should not be viewed as humans of our species or exponents of our way of thinking.

Source: Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 19/4003, Bl. 3–52 (emphasis in the original)

Translation: Ewald Osers