Rudolf Diels and the Founding of the German Gestapo

Totalitarian regimes don’t just happen.  Individuals are identified as lynchpins in the crossover between a democracy and any totalitarian dictatorship.  In the case of Rudolf Diels, police chief of the emerging political police or “Gestapo”, evidence suggests his existence hovered between collaboration and opposition mostly from a kind of self interest and vicious internal conflict engendered withing the Third Reich.  The earliest struggles for power actually occurred within the Nazi regime itself and it had everything to do with who controlled the police and military muscle. 

Nancy Dougherty’s “The Hangman and His Wife The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich” describes Diel’s encounter with one of many women – in particular Martha Eccles Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador to Germany.  Dodd estimated that at least twelve people a day were killed while Diels was head of the Secret Police.[1]  She describes a typical encounter where “suddenly, late in the evening (he always came late) you would almost feel a chill in the room and Diels would appear at your elbow in all his dark and horrible glamour.”[2]  It goes without saying that Diels somehow survived with enemies high in the regime including Himmler (and Heydrich) who planned to add him to the list of murdered during Hitler’s famous Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934.  He survived as an emerging example of the fact that the “Third Reich grew less from design than as an awkward assemblage of pragmatic compromises.”[3]  Certainly the history of the Prussian political police and the transition between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich deserves a closer look.[4]  The template of terror led to the shaping changes in the territories soon after the outcome of the Polish campaign in September 1939; this included building a loyal police force from scratch.[5]

Rudolf Diels (born December 16, 1900 in Berghausen, Unterlahnkreis; † November 18, 1957 in Katzenelnbogen) was a German administrative lawyer and the first head of the Gestapo from April 1933 to April 1934.[6]

Diels in 1933

Diels worked in the Prussian Interior Ministry from 1930 and worked with Hermann Göring even before Hitler came to power in 1933. After the National Socialist seizure of power, he became head of the Prussian political police, from which the Gestapo emerged.  After he had to vacate his post in the wake of power struggles between Göring and Heinrich Himmler, he worked as district president in Cologne and Hanover. After the end of the war, Diels appeared as a witness in the Nuremberg trials.

Life

The son of a large farmer from Berghausen received his high school diploma at the Royal Gymnasium in Wiesbaden on September 24, 1918. He then volunteered for military service and was stationed for a few weeks at a telecommunications unit in Hagenau, Alsace, at the end of the First World War. He began studying political science and law in the spring of 1919 at the Ludwig University of Giessen and moved to the Philipps University of Marburg in May. Here he also joined the Corps Rhenania-Straßburg zu Marburg. After passing the first state law exam in 1922, Diels worked as a government trainee in Kassel. He passed the second state examination in 1924, followed by positions as a government assessor in Neuruppin, Teltow and Peine.

Prussian Ministry of Interior

In 1930, Diels received a post as a government councilor in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior under Minister Carl Severing. There he was “head of the department for combating the communist movement” in the political department of the police. In the same year, Diels married his first wife, Hildegard Mannesmann. In the wake of the Prussian attack, Diels was able to significantly advance his career through support services. Diels passed information about a meeting between State Secretary Wilhelm Abegg (Diels’ superior) and the KPD politicians Wilhelm Kasper and Ernst Torgler to the group around Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. This information – which reproduced the actual meeting in a distorted form and was also leaked to the press – formed the basis for the claim that the Prussian government was colluding with the communists, and thus provided a welcome pretext for the appointment of a Reich Commissioner in Prussia.[7]

As a result, Diels was unexpectedly promoted to senior government councilor in August 1932 – such a rank was unusual for his age at the time, although some older officials were passed over. At the same time, Diels took over the management of the political department of the Prussian police.

According to the Spruchkammer’s files from Diels’ denazification files, he had been in contact with von Papen and the National Socialists since the early 1930s, and from the end of 1932 he made direct contact with Göring, to whom he in turn passed on information about Communists and Social Democrats.

Chief of the Political Police

Diels in December 1933 at the Concentration Camp Esterwegen

Immediately after Hitler became Chancellor, Göring set about reorganizing the police. On February 15, 1933, Magnus von Levetzow became the new police chief in Berlin, and Diels’ responsibilities as head of the political department were expanded. Göring pursued the plan to separate the political department from the Prussian police and place it directly under his Ministry of the Interior, and achieved his goal with the establishment of the Secret State Police Office (Gestapo) on April 26, 1933. Rudolf Diels became its head as inspector on the same day.  In July 1933 he was promoted to ministerial councilor. 

Although Diels later presented his activities in this early phase of the Nazi dictatorship as resistance, he demonstrably cooperated willingly with the new rulers.  He took over as SA leader in the police service and thus promoted the links between the Gestapo and the SA party thugs, of which he had been a supporting member since March 1932. With Göring he campaigned for the suppression of the investigation into the Albrecht Hohler case. Hohler – imprisoned since 1930 for the murder of Horst Wessel – was kidnapped and murdered by the SA in September 1933.

After the Second World War, members of the SA in question and the Gestapo officer Pohlenz unanimously claimed that Diels was personally present when Hohler was murdered and that he had even “legalized” this act by issuing a transfer order to the SA.  It was therefore not a real kidnapping.

Diels also played a role in establishing the instrument of protective custody and in the persecution of Jews. Even after the war, he spoke positively about the Nazi terror against the communists.

Conflicts that Diels fought with the SA and SS – for example over the early concentration camps – cannot be traced back to Diels’ critical attitude towards the National Socialists, but primarily to disputes over jurisdiction.

District president and SS leader

December 18, 1933, prisoners released from Oranienburg concentration camp; front row 3rd from left: Police Vice President Rudolf Diels

At the end of 1933, Diels became involved in the power struggle between Himmler and Göring.  He was dismissed as head of the Gestapo by Göring and was forced to flee to Czechoslovakia.  His apartment and office were searched by the SS and SA. He took over his office at short notice on the recommendation of the commissioner z.B.V. Kurt Daluege, the police chief of Altona-Wandsbek Paul Hinkler. It was only at Göring’s urging that Diels returned to Berlin and was appointed police vice-president of Berlin on November 18, 1933. On November 29th he was able to resume his previous position as Gestapo inspector. After the war, Diels portrayed himself as being persecuted by the SS (particularly by Reinhard Heydrich), which is difficult to reconcile with the fact that he was accepted into the SS by Himmler on September 15, 1933 as a rank leader with the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer (SS No. 187.116) and was honorarily promoted to SS-Standartenführer on November 9, 1933.

Apparently, Diels had helped Robert Kempner emigrate and was therefore placed into temporary retirement on April 21, 1934, and Himmler was his successor as Gestapo chief. On May 9, 1934, Diels received a post as district president in Cologne.

Diels survived the purges in the wake of the Röhm affair in the summer of 1934 unscathed because he could be sure of Göring’s protection (until the end of the Third Reich).

Probably after conflicts with the Essen Gauleiter Josef Terboven, he was transferred to Hanover as district president in July 1936. On May 1, 1937, Diels joined the NSDAP (membership number 3,955,308) and became district leader of the Nazi Student Combat Aid for the province of Hanover.  On August 16, 1938, his daughter Corinna Genest was born in Konstanz.  She came from a relationship with the actress Gudrun Genest and later became an actress herself.  On April 20, 1939, Diels was appointed SS Oberführer and worked on the staff of SS Section IV (Hannover).

In 1941 – again thanks to Göring – as part of the reorganization of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, he became chairman of the board (general director) of the holding company Reichswerke AG for inland shipping “Hermann Göring”. From March 1, 1942, Diels worked on the staff of the SS main office, and by November 30, 1944 he had received the SS sword of honor and the SS skull ring.

Diels’ first marriage ended in divorce in 1936. On January 17, 1943, Diels married Ilse Göring.  She was a daughter of Lieutenant Commander Otto Burchard (1865-1904) and his wife Frieda Burchard née Göring (1875-1929) and her first marriage was to a half-brother of her mother and Hermann Göring’s brother, Karl Ernst Göring (1885-1932) been.  After renewed difficulties with the Gestapo at the end of 1943, he was sent to a cure in Lugano at Göring’s instigation.  Apparently, he tried to apply for asylum there, but was turned away by the Swiss immigration police.  In Lugano, Diels also met Hans Bernd Gisevius again, his former competitor for the leadership of the Gestapo and one of the co-conspirators of July 20, 1944.  After his return, Diels was arrested twice by the Gestapo (spring and November 1944).

After the War

Diels was arrested on May 3, 1945 and interned until 1948. From autumn 1945 to summer 1947 he appeared as a witness in the Nuremberg trials.  On January 29, 1948, his twin daughters Lieselotte and Renate were born in Nuremberg, from a relationship with an employee of the Nuremberg court. Diels then worked for the US military government – he had already made contact with the CIC in 1948.  Diels emerged from his denazification process in mid-1949 relatively unscathed because he had advocates such as Paul Löbe and Ernst Torgler.  Regardless of this, an arrest warrant was issued against him in the Soviet occupation zone on January 5, 1949, but it was not executed in the western zones.

Also in 1949, Diels published his autobiography “Lucifer ante portas”. The first head of the Gestapo speaks,” which appeared as a preprint (the book version was still changed) in a nine-part series (May to July 1949) in the news magazine Der Spiegel and, despite its apologetic character, is considered an important source for the early Nazi regime. According to the publicist and former Spiegel editor Peter-Ferdinand Koch, Fritz Tobias established Diels’ – and also Paul Karl Schmidt’s – contacts with Spiegel. Diels had good contact with Rudolf Augstein and considerable influence on the political direction of Spiegel.

After his internment ended, Diels lived alternately on his estate in Kaltenweide-Twenge (Langenhagen) near Hanover, which he sold in 1955, and his parents’ farm in Berghausen, which he continued to operate until his fatal accident two years later. He was paid by the state of Lower Saxony until his death. In connection with the John affair, Diels published a vicious pamphlet against Otto John in 1954, which brought him legal proceedings.[8]

In 1957, the magazines Stern and Weltbild printed series about the Reichstag fire and the seizure of power, which were essentially based on Diels’ information and in which the SA was held responsible for the Reichstag fire.

Diels died in November 1957 during a hunting trip after a shot was fired when he took his hunting weapon out of the car.

Characterization

After the end of the war, Rudolf Diels (unsurprisingly) always characterized himself as an opponent of National Socialism and referred to his persecution by the SS, especially by Heydrich. It is confirmed that he occasionally helped those persecuted by the Nazis emigrate, which benefited him during denazification through exculpatory statements from Paul Löbe and Carl Severing, for example. However, he also made it clear: “I did not give in to the pressure from my friends to join forces with those who wanted to kill Hitler, even though I should have done it out of personal self-defense.”

Others describe Diels as an opportunist who adapted to the circumstances when it was beneficial to his career.  During the Weimar Republic, Diels was close to liberal circles and frequented the Berlin Democratic Club, whose president was the Jewish deputy police chief Bernhard Weiß.  Even before the seizure of power, Diels was on good terms with Göring, whose protection he enjoyed until the end of the war.  During his term as head of the Gestapo, Diels worked on legal regulations on protective custody and the persecution of Jews, and he was also involved in setting up the Sonnenburg concentration camp. After the fall of the Third Reich, Diels was in the service of the Allied occupation administration from 1948/49.

Representatives of the thesis that the Reichstag fire was staged by the SA have portrayed Diels as an accomplice.  Allegedly, the incriminating material that he transported abroad also included documents that identified the “real perpetrators”.  Diels himself expressed contradictions in this regard.  Until 1949 he believed that the SA had set fire to the Reichstag, but later changed his opinion to the effect that the Dutchman van der Lubbe was the sole perpetrator. Diels did not comment on his reasons for his respective views. Shortly before his death – according to the founder of the sole perpetrator thesis Fritz Tobias in the 1960s – he is said to have planned to work with the Institute for Contemporary History to develop a reconstruction of the events at that time.  The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett contradicts this. He points out that in a letter dated July 22, 1946 to the British delegation to the International Military Tribunal, Diels named former SA leader Hans Georg Pistole as the likely main perpetrator in the arson.  His later, sometimes contradictory statements on this issue were of a tactical nature.

Marriage and Family

On March 28, 1930, Diels married Hildegard Liese Mannesmann (born September 18, 1905 in Remscheid), a daughter of the industrialist Alfred Mannesmann, in Berlin.  This marriage was dissolved by a judgment of the Berlin Regional Court that became final on September 11, 1936 (220 R. 320.36).

In 1943, Diels married Ilse Göring, née Burchhard (1898–1972), the widow of Hermann Göring’s older brother Karl Göring and also the daughter of Hermann and Karl Göring’s half-sister Friederike Wilhelmine Göring, married as Burchard (1875–1929).

Works:

Lucifer ante portas. Between Severing and Heydrich. Interverlag, Zurich 1949.

The Otto John case. Göttinger Verlag-Anstalt, Göttingen 1954.


Translated and annotated by David Grunwald

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Footnotes

[1] Nancy Dougherty “The Hangman and His Wife The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich Knopf New York 2022 p. 173

[2] ibid p. 174

[3] Dougherty p. 175

[4] Graf, Christoph. “The Genesis of the Gestapo.” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 3 (1987): 419–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/260744.

[5] Grabowski, Jan, and Zbigniew R. Grabowski. “Germans in the Eyes of the Gestapo: The Ciechanów District, 1939-1945.” Contemporary European History 13, no. 1 (2004): p. 25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081190.

[6] https://www.wikiwand.com/de/Rudolf_Diels  The remainder of this article was translated from German to English

[7] With regard to the role of Rudolf Diels, who later became the first head of the Gestapo, the Abegg affair is also an example of the beginning orientation of senior officials in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and the Political Police towards the imminent dictatorial restructuring of the state, which was expected in this well-informed milieu in one way or another, and the resulting consequences accompanying dissolution of the loyalty relationships that had been effective until then. Diels completed the transformation from the protégé of a left-liberal state secretary to a confidant of right-wing conservative advocates of a corporate state and finally to head of the secret police of a right-wing radical terror regime within just a few months.

[8] The Otto John Affair unfolded in 1956. During his tenure as the head of the BND, John disappeared under mysterious circumstances. He went to East Germany and allegedly defected to the communist side. His disappearance created a political and intelligence crisis in West Germany and raised questions about the loyalty of officials in sensitive positions.