Hermann Goering
The Leader appointed me a member of the new Cabinet. Before my appointment I had already been Speaker of the German Reichstag and I was to continue to hold this office. But the Leader gave me the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, above all things in order that I should overthrow and crush Communism in this, the greatest State of the Reich. He wished me to root out this destructive and traitorous party, and to inspire the State officials with the austere philosophy of National Socialism in place of the existing corrupt Marxist-bourgeois ideas. In Prussia at that time the Marxist Government under the Social Democrat Braun was, on paper and de jure, still in power, but de facto this Government had been deposed by the then Chancellor von Papen on the preceding 12th June and had no rights. Nevertheless they still, proud and undaunted, called themselves the 'sovereign' Government of Prussia and therewith proclaimed right up to the end the full absurdity of their existence.
And so I became Commissioner for the Interior in Prussia and at the same time Minister of the Reich. An enormous task lay before me. The Prussian Ministry of the Interior has always been one of the most powerful of the Reich and State Ministries. It was here that Severing and Grzesinski had played their political game. It was from here that they had carried on their terrorist activities against the National Socialists. It was for that reason that every National Socialist, and above all the simple Storm Troopers, felt particularly proud and gratified when this Ministry was put into the hands of an old champion of the movement. For it was from here that they had been persecuted and tormented, and from here all those orders and decrees had been issued to suppress them; here it was that the directions had been given for the brutal persecution of the fighters for freedom. And now, on the 1st February, 1933, amidst the deafening applause of a crowd of several thousands, the victorious swastika was hoisted to the main flagstaff, before a guard of honour consisting of police, guards and Steel Helmets and a band playing the Prussian ceremonial march.
(a) The Reorganization of the Police
I had taken on a heavy responsibility, and a vast field of work lay before me. It was clear that I should be able to make little use of the administrative system as it then was. I should have to make great changes. To begin with, it seemed to me of the first importance to get the weapon of the criminal and political police firmly into my own hands. Here it was that I made the first sweeping changes of personnel. Out Of 32 police chiefs I removed 22. Hundreds of inspectors and thousands of police sergeants followed in the course of the next month. New men were brought in, and in every case these men came from the great reservoir of the Storm Troops and Guards. My task was to inspire the police with an entirely new spirit. Previously the Police had been degraded to the role of whipping-boy for the Republic, partly by compelling them to belabour the Republic's opponents and partly by always shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of minor officials, the leaders being too cowardly to stand up for their subordinates. Now that was all going to be changed. Authority would be in the right place. After a few weeks one could already notice how the bearing of the Police had changed, how they had become more assured and self-confident, how the embittered officials gradually became valuable officers and police-sergeants. They in no way received military training, but were nevertheless imbued with the traditional soldierly virtues. Devotion to duty; loyalty and obedience were demanded of them, and above all that they should pledge themselves unreservedly to serve the National Socialist State and the new Germany. Young and tried officers who in the past years had not allowed themselves to be cowed by the Republic were promoted and put into re sponsible Positions. A particular troop, Police Division Wecke, was picked out and equipped with all weapons allowed to the Police and formed the vanguard of the new Police force. But thereby the ambition of other squads was aroused, and they strove to show that they could be just as good and efficient as these picked men. As an outward sign of this newly-awakened feeling of pride, I forbade all officers and inspectors, and later on all other Police officials, to carry batons. It was not in harmony with my feelings as an officer that the Police should run round and strike at the public with batons. A Police officer only resorts to force in cases of extreme necessity, only when it is a matter of life or death, but then he must draw his revolver and shoot to protect State and people. But up to then the state of things had been such, that when some policeman fired his revolver in self-defence he became involved in criminal proceedings which usually resulted in his being embittered and punished. No wonder then that the Police no longer dared to act in a brave and resolute way, but only worked off their rage with their batons where they could safely do so. The police of the Severing regime knew perfectly well that our men were unarmed and could not shoot at them; they therefore dared to belabour them with their batons. But they proceeded against the Communists in quite a different way. They knew that the Communists might shoot at them with revolvers; that they had often experienced, and officers and men had often been shot. But nothing was done by the Government to protect them. The Communists, the 'political children' of Herr Severing, were always defended in the end by their Red sympathizers. Now everything was fundamentally changed.
I gave strict orders and demanded that the police should devote all their energies to the ruthless extermination of subversive elements. In one of my first big meetings in Dortmund 1 declared that for the future there would only be one man who would bear the responsibility in Prussia, and that one man was myself. Whoever did his duty in the service of the State, whoever obeyed my orders, and took severe measures against the State's enemies, whoever ruthlessly made use of his revolver when attacked, could be certain of protection. Whoever on the other hand was a coward and avoided a fight and looked the other way, whoever hesitated to make use of his weapons, would have to count on being thrown out by me at the earliest possible moment. I declared then, before thousands of my fellow-countrymen, that every bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol was my bullet. If you call that murder, then I am the murderer. Everything has been ordered by me; I stand for it and shall not be afraid to take the responsibility upon myself. Whoever sees the Prussian police of today, after three-quarters of a year, will be quite unable to recognize in them the police of Herr Severing. The core of the police force was excellent, and what we have succeeded in doing in the last few months has been to make of the Prussian police an instrument which gives the State the right feeling of security and gives the police themselves the proud feeling that they are the first and sharpest weapon of the State. By the changing of the ugly uniform and the awarding of flags to squads, the self-respect of officers and men was increased. The new oath of allegiance now had a deeper meaning and to fulfil it had become their sacred duty.
(b) The Organization of the State Secret Police
The state of things in the political police was very bad indeed. Here I found nearly everywhere trusted agents of the Social Democrats, the creatures of Herr Severing. These men formed the ill-famed 1 A division (political police). I could in the prevailing state of things make no use of them. To be true, the worst elements had been removed by my predecessor, Bracht. But now I had to make a complete job of it, and for weeks I was personally engaged in the work of reorganization. Finally I alone created, on my own initiative, the 'State Secret Police Department.' This is the instrument which is so much feared by the enemies of the State, and which is chiefly responsible for the fact that in Germany and Prussia today there is no question of a Marxist or Communist danger. Without taking seniority into consideration, I put the ablest men I had into this 'State Secret Police Department,' and put it under the command of the most capable of my younger officials. Every day I am further strengthened in my opinion that I chose the right men. The achievements of Diels and his men will always remain one of the glories of the first year of German recovery. I was also Most actively supported by the Guards and Storm Troops. Without their help and support I should never have mastered the enemies of the State so quickly and effectively. I have now reorganized the Seeret Police once more and placed it under my direct control. By means of a network of centres in the provinces, with Berlin as the headquarters, I am kept daily, I might almost say hourly, informed of everything which happens in the vast Prussian State. The last refuge of the Communists is known to us. However often they change their tactics and change the names of their couriers, a few days later they are tracked down, reported, watched and arrested. We had to proceed against these enemies of the State with complete ruthlessness. It must not be forgotten that at the moment of our taking over the Government there were, according to the March election figures, about fourteen million supporters of Communism and Marxism. These people were indeed not all of them enemies of the State. The greater part of them, countless millions, were good Germans, led astray by insane theories and by the emptiness and spinelessness of the Middle Class Parties. It was therefore all the more urgent that these people should be rescued from error and brought back once more into the community of the German people. But it was also just as necessary to take strong action against the deceivers, agitators and chiefs themselves. And so the concentration camps were set up, to which we had sent first of all thousands of officials of the Communist and Socialist Democratic parties. It was only natural that in the beginning excesses were committed. lt was natural that here and there beatings took place ; there were some cases of brutality. But if we consider the greatness of the occasion and all that had preceded it, we must admit that this German revolution for freedom was one of the most bloodless and most disciplined of all revolutions in history.
(c) The wiping out of Marxism and Communism
Certain unpleasant and undesired phenomena are the concomitants of every revolution. But if, as in this case, they are so few, and if the aim of the revolution is so completely attained, nobody has any right to work up an agitation about them.
But I most strongly protest against the flood of mean and dastardly calumnies and atrocity stories which have been spread abroad bv creatures who have fled from Germany and have no honour and no Fatherland. By spreading these stories, the Jews of Germany have proved more conclusively than we could do in our speeches and attacks how right we were in our defensive action against them. Here the Jew is in his element, lying and concocting atrocity stories, from a safe distance throwing buckets full of mud at the people and country whose hospitality he had enjoyed for decades. The decent Jews have only the members of their own race to thank that they are now treated all alike. They can send their protests to the Jewish organizations abroad which play the chief part in the atrocity campaign. Our case against the Jews is not merely that the part they played in every profession was out of all proportion to their total numbers; it is not merely that they had made themselves masters of finance, capital; it is not merely that they carried on usury and corruption on a vast scale and that they exploited Germany and sucked the blood from her veins; it is not merely that they were primarily to blame for the crime of the inflation, that they pitilessly strangled their economically weaker German hosts. Our chief accusation against the Jews is that it was they who provided the Marxists and Communists with their leaders, and it was they who occupied the editorial offices of those subversive and defamatory newspapers which besmirched with their venom and hatred all that to us Germans was sacred; they it was who cynically distorted and ridiculed the words 'German' and 'National,' and the ideas of honour and freedom, marriage and loyalty. No wonder, then, that the German people was at last seized with a righteous anger and was at last unwilling to allow these parasites and oppressors to play the part of master any longer. Only he who has observed the activities of the Jews in Germany, only he who knows the Jew from his behaviour in Germany, can fully understand the necessity of what has now been done. The Jewish question has not yet been completely solved. All that has happened up to the present has simply been defence of the people, a reaction against the ruin and corruption produced by Jewish race. If we look at it from this point of view, we see that the revolution was perfectly ordered and bloodless. It destroyed what was old and rotten, and brought to the front what was new and undefiled.
The Secret Police have contributed much to the success of this revolution and have helped to defend its achievements.
In the midst of this constructive work the great fire broke out which burned the cupola and chamber of the Reichstag. Criminals had planned this fire, had set fire to the German Reichstag in order to give the already moribund Communist Party the signal for a last desperate attack before the Hitler Government was firmly in the saddle. The fire was to be the signal for a general reign of terror on the part of the Communists, for a general rising and civil war. It is not because of the noble motives of the Communists that those results did not take place ; they did not take place simply and solely because of the iron will and the strong arm of Adolf Hitler and his fellow-fighters, who struck quicker than the enemy had calculated and harder than they could suspect, and, at the first blow, crushed thern once and for all.
In that night, when I had given the order for the arrest of 4,000 Communist officials, I knew that before the dawn the Communists would have lost a great battle. But now our task was to inform the people of the terrible danger that had threatened it. At last it was possible to obtain an insight into the Communists' most secret plans and their organizations and aims. We could see now what criminal and ruthless means these inhuman creatures intended to use in order to destroy a brave people and a proud empire. I have been reproached with publishing old instructions as the Communist orders for civil war. Does anyone really think that an order is less dangerous because it was issued years before? Does anyone really think that we must judge the Reichstag fire more leniently because we can say that it liad already been planned by the Communists several years before? Today when I am asked by bourgeois politicians if this extreme defensive action was really necessary, the Communist danger really so very great, if I did not go too far - I can only reply with amazement and contempt: 'Yes, if you Middle Class cowards have no more Communist danger to fear and have escaped the horrors of a Communist revolution, it is not because you, and people like you, existed, but because, while you were talking away at your dilettante parlour Bolshevism, there were men who saw the danger for what it was and removed it.'If I am further accused of having myself set fire to the Reichstag in order to get the Communists into my hands, I can only say that the idea is ridiculous and grotesque. I did not need any special event to enable me to proceed against the Communists. The record of their crimes was already so long and their offence so atrocious that 1 was in any case resolved to use all the powers at my disposal in order ruthlessly to wipe out this plague. The firing of the Reichstag did not, as a matter of fact, at all fit in with my plans, as I have already pointed out in my evidence at the Reichstag fire trial. It forced me to act sooner than I had intended and to strike before I had finished making the necessary preparations. For me there is no doubt whatever that those who instigated and planned the fire were the Communist Party, and that there must have been several persons who actually did the deed. The one who was caught was probably the clumsiest and stupidest of them. But the incendiaries themselves were not ultimately responsible. Their spiritual fathers and the secret wire-pullers behind the scenes are the real criminals against the German people and the destroyers of German culture.
(d) Prime Minister of Prussia
It very soon became clear to me that it was absolutely necessary that I should, beside being Prussian Minister of the Interior, also be Prime Minister. Only if I held this post could I properly carry out my task of exterminating subversive ideas, doing away with the Middle Class Parties and bringing in the new order. For this reason I settled the ridiculous question of the 'sovereign' Prussian Government. I also got Herr von Papen, as had been previously arranged, to retire from his post of Commissioner for Prussia in order that the Leader could give the post to me. It was only because I was able to strengthen the position of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior through the authority of the Prussian Prime Ministership that it was possible for me to carry out all the necessary reforms. For the post of Prussian Prime Minister was now more important and stronger than before. In the preceding years he had merely been a parliamentary figure and had not been able to do more than influence the general direction of policy, but now the post meant unrestricted authority. The Prussian Prime Minister was now responsible for the whole of the Prussian State, particularly now that the Chancellor, after the Statthalter Law was passed, had transferred his rights as Statthalter of Prussia to me. During my stay in Rome at Easter a particularly gratifying telegram from the Leader informed me of my appointment as Prussian Prime Minister:
'I appoint you Prime Minister of Prussia as from today (10th April). Please take over your duties in Berlin on April 20th.
'I am happy to be able to give you this token of my confidence in you and gratitude for the great services you have rendered to the German people during the ten years in which you have been a fighter in our Movement for the regeneration of Germany. I thank you, too, for your services as Commissioner for Internal Affairs in Prussia in successfully carrying through the National Revolution, and above all I thank you for the unique loyalty with which you have bound your fate to mine.'
Since my appointment, which was thus the result of Hitler's confidence in me, I had the fate of Prussia in my hands and was conscious of being able to take part, from the Most important position in the Reich, in Adolf Hitler's great work of reconstruction. For Prussia has had at all times a mission and responsibility beyond her own borders and that has been 'The solution of the German Question.' Laws passed in Prussia often served as a pattern for the other States by virtue of the newly-created sovereignty of the Reich and its Chancellor. For this reason I tried as soon as possible to put our National Socialist principles into practice in Prussia. This was made possible through the creation of a totalitarian State, that is by the victory all over Germany of the National Socialist Party and its continuance as the sole political organization in the country. It was also made possible by the Leader giving me full authority. I joyfully undertook the mighty task of turning a Prussia which had become rotten through Marxist misgovernment into a new State inspired with the spirit of Frederick the Great. The Diet was immediately abolished. In its place I put the Prussian Council of State. This Council of State consisted of men who had been appointed by me partly on account of their high position in the Party or in the Storm Troops, and partly because they had distinguished themselves in other ways. Their task was to help me with their advice, to study drafts of laws, to make suggestions, and to keep up the living connection between Government and people. But the Council of State only has an advisory capacity. It can make no decisions, neither can it take over any responsibility. The Prime Minister alone carries the responsibility and no committee can relieve him of it. The principle of leadership was hence introduced in its purest form, at the same time maintaining a living contact with the people.
Our task was everywhere to build up anew, and we can proudly say that we have accomplished a great work.
During the first weeks I sat night after night until 2, 3 or 4 o'clock in my office in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Later on I moved over to the Prussian Ministry of State. Special departments were put under my direct supervision, such as the State and Municipal theatres, which were all threatened with complete ruin and had to be entirely reorganized. This was a task which demanded strong nerves and a great deal of time. I had always been very interested in forestry, and now I was supervisor of the greatest forest estate in Germany, namely the Prussian State forests. Here, too, I wished to set out in an entirely new direction. I therefore put this department, too, under my direct supervision and created the necessary foundations and passed the necessary laws.
It was indeed a full and active life into which the Leader had called me. I was President of the Reichstag, Prussian Prime Minister, Prussian Minister of the Interior, and in addition a firm National Socialist who continued to hold public meetings in order never to lose contact with the people. The tasks were often overwhelming, but on the other hand they steeled one's strength and spurred one on to achieve one's utmost. But over everything there was the blessed feeling of happiness that one was permitted to serve one's country in one of the most important positions, and to be supported by the wonderful confidence of the Leader and - this perhaps for a man the most splendid of all - to be able to form and to create.
(e) Aviation
As a former airman - I was given yet another sphere of work. The Chancellor had rightly seen that the civil air lines were of great importance. They had therefore to be taken out of the control of the Ministry of Transport. A new Air Ministry was formed and the Leader appointed me as its head. He gave me the task of making the German air service the best and safest in the world and of raising the commercial air fleet to a new pinnacle of importance. Above all, the German flying spirit, which had been held down by the chains of the Treaty of Versailles, was to find a new outlet in air sports.
There was not much in the way of machines for me to take over. They were mostly old models, for there were only a very few up-to-date passenger planes. Here, too, I had to give my whole strength to the great task.
It also seemed to me absolutely necessary to convince the other Powers that Germany too had at least the right to a defensive fleet. Germany, surrounded by Powers bristling with armaments and herself completely unarmed, does not possess even a single chaser machine or a single observation plane. She is completely at the mercy of other Powers. It is true that Germany has been permitted to keep a small navy and a small force for land defence. But what is the use of this horizontal defence if an enemy plans to attack us vertically? Not a single French soldier, not a single enemy battleship, need advance against Germany; without any risk to themselves the air fleets of France, Poland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and other countries could fly over Germany and wipe out thriving German towns and villages, and kill and mutilate innocent men. Who can here speak of equality of rights? And what trace is there here of the right to defend oneself? And where is there any trace of the much talked about international morality and international spirit and of European civilization? Never and at no stage of the negotiations did we ask for offensive planes or bombing planes. We only wanted to defend ourselves, to have defensive machines against enemy attacks, to have chaser machines against enemy bombing squadrons. Why are we not allowed such machines? If the other powers say they never wish to attack, if they have no evil designs on Germany, why should they not permit Germany to defend herself? Why may Germany not possess anti-aircraft guns? The suspicion is indeed forced upon one that it is intended at the appointed time to fall upon Germany and to invade her in all safety from the air. The world must at last awaken to the fact, and the nations be made to realize, that to grant Germany a small army and navy for her security is a mere mockery so long as the vertical line is undefended and open to all attacks. It is therefore my task to go on exhorting and demanding until Germany has at last obtained true equality and security.