Anthony Read - The Devil’s Disciples: The Lives and Times of Hitler’s Inner Circle

CONTENTS

ALSO BY ANTHONY READ

With David Fisher:

Operation Lucy

Colonel Z: The Secret Life of a Master of Spies

The Deadly Embrace:

Hitler, Stalin and the NaziSoviet Pact

Kristallnacht

The Fall of Berlin

Berlin: The Biography of a City

(published as Berlin Rising in the USA)

The Proudest Day:

Indias Long Road to Independence

With Ray Bearse:

Conspirator:

Churchill, Roosevelt and Tyler Kent, Spy

For young people:

The True Book about the Theatre

For Rosemary,

with eternal love and gratitude

PROLOGUE

They called it ASHCAN, a sardonic acronym for Allied Supreme Headquarters Centre for Axis Nationals. Into it, in May 1945, the American and British victors of the Second World War dumped what remained of the leadership of Hitlers Third Reich: fifty-two assorted politicians, military commanders and high officials to be interrogated, investigated, and prepared for trial at Nuremberg as war criminals.

ASHCAN was housed in the Palace Hotel in Mondorf-les-Bains, a genteel spa town with quiet, tree-lined streets around a manicured public park, set amid woodland and vineyards in the rolling countryside of the south-east corner of the Duchy of Luxembourg. A small stream on the southern edge of the town marked the border with France; the border with Germany lay about six kilometres to the east, in the gorge of the Mosel river. The Palace was the principal among the towns dozen or so hotels, standing in a raised position in its own extensive gardens and grounds. It was an undistinguished building, eight storeys tall with the top two in a mansard roof, its two wings forming a shallow V, its pale stuccoed walls enlivened with art-deco style panels, a far cry from the tawdry glories of the Reich.

In peacetime, the Palace catered discreetly for well-to-do visitors seeking relief from rheumatism and liver complaints at the towns two thermal springs. But in May 1945, the fine fittings and furnishings chandeliers, carpets and drapes, soft furniture were all stripped out. In the bedrooms, folding camp cots with no pillows, straw-filled palliasses and rough army blankets replaced the comfortable beds and interior sprung mattresses. The only other furniture in each room was a hard upright chair and a flimsy table designed to collapse immediately under a mans weight, to foil any suicide attempt. The glass in the windows was replaced, first with wire netting and later with shatter-proof Perspex and metal bars. There were no lights or electricity in the rooms, no mirrors, and no locks on the doors, but an opening was cut into each to allow guards to look in at all times. Outside, a private airstrip was laid in the grounds, which were enclosed by a barbed wire stockade with an electric alarm system and four watchtowers equipped with machine guns and searchlights, more for the protection of the prisoners than to prevent escapes.

The Americans who had requisitioned the hotel were taking no chances over the safety of their guests but it was made abundantly clear to those guests that their status had changed abruptly, and permanently. Only a few days before, they would have demanded every scrap of luxury the hotel could provide. For years they had wallowed in power, position and privilege. Now they were reduced to empty husks, some pitiful, some posturing as they tried to hold on to their illusions, clinging to the last shreds of authority.

From the moment they arrived, prisoners were subjected to humiliation and obloquy, beginning with an intimate strip search by a prison doctor. Their clothes were taken away and examined minutely for poison capsules or suicide weapons, which were often found sewn into uniforms or concealed in the heels of shoes. Anything sharp was confiscated, including the pins on medals, insignia and badges of rank; so, too, were shoe laces, belts, braces, suspenders, neckties, steel-shod shoes, spectacles, and all walking sticks, canes and batons, a loss which rankled particularly with the field marshals. In the face of such indignities, most of the men for they were all men, women having been restricted to supporting roles in Nazi ideology found it difficult to maintain any sort of dignity, let alone the hauteur which had become second nature over the previous twelve years.

The first important Nazi to arrive was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, tall and thin, limping heavily on his left leg as a result of a wound received during the First World War when he had been an officer in the Austrian army. His captors found it difficult to believe that this man, peering vapidly about him through thick spectacles, had for seven years exercised the power of life and death over millions. This was the man who, in 1938 as Minister of the Interior in Vienna, had handed Austria to Hitler on a plate by opening the frontier to the German army. He had then unleashed 40,000 police and Deaths Head SS men on the countrys 300,000 Jews, and provided a former palace of the Rothschilds as headquarters for Adolf Eichmann and his Central Office for Jewish Emigration. After a year as Governor of Austria, Seyss-Inquart had become Deputy Governor-General of Poland and then, from May 1940, Commissioner in the Netherlands, where over the following five years he was responsible for tens of thousands of deportations to concentration camps, countless summary executions, and in the final weeks of the war the death by starvation of at least 16,000 Dutch citizens.

Seyss-Inquart was followed by Hans Frank, who arrived in a US army ambulance, a pitiful wreck of a man still in a serious condition after slashing his wrists and throat in a suicide attempt. Now forty-five years old, with thinning dark hair, Frank had joined the German Workers Party, forerunner of the National Socialists, as a nineteen-year-old law student in Munich; he became a member of the SA in 1923, marching behind Hitler in the abortive putsch on 9 November. He had later become the Partys legal adviser and leading jurist, making his name as defence counsel for members charged with criminal and civil offences before Hitler came to power. He was also Hitlers personal lawyer. After 1933, he had been responsible for transforming the German legal system to serve National Socialism. In spite of his culpability for countless cases of perverted justice, he might still have escaped trial as a major war criminal had he not been appointed Governor-General of Poland in October 1939.

Hitlers orders to Frank when he appointed him as his viceroy were unequivocal: he was to assume the administration of the conquered territories with the special order ruthlessly to exploit this region as a war zone and booty country, to reduce it, as it were, to a heap of rubble in its economic, social, cultural and political structure. Ruling like some oriental despot from the splendour of Cracow Castle, Frank more than fulfilled his brief, turning his fiefdom into the bloodiest of all the occupied territories, with the possible exception of the western Soviet Union under Alfred Rosenbergs tender care. Basically insecure, and with his authority threatened by a constant power struggle with the SS, Frank compensated for his weakness with exaggerated brutality. He supervised the slaughter of the Polish intelligentsia, shipped hundreds of thousands of slave labourers to the Reich, and provided the sites for several of the most notorious death camps, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, proclaiming that his mission was to rid Poland of lice and Jews.

For all the blood on their hands, however, men like Seyss-Inquart and Frank were not in the first rank of the Nazi leadership. They were essentially functionaries, never among the movers and shakers of the Party at the highest level, which was Hitlers inner circle. This tiny group, never numbering more than half a dozen at any one time, enjoyed Hitlers exclusive confidence; only its members had any influence on him or were able to instigate policy decisions. They alone had the authority to interpret his wishes, which except in the military sphere during the war were usually expressed in the vaguest and most generalised terms, and put them into execution as they saw fit. This was the basis of their power. It was also its deepest flaw, for each depended entirely on Hitlers favour, which could be withdrawn at any moment and for which they were continually required to compete. As a consequence, it was inevitable that they should all seek approval by demonstrating themselves to be, as it were, more Catholic than the Pope in both word and deed. Each strove to out-do the others in brutality which Hitler professed to admire the virulence of their anti-Semitism, and their total commitment to the cause. Their rivalry was therefore at the root of many of the worst excesses of Nazi policy.