The State Security Organs and Terror

Chapter 4 Section 2

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This below is Chapter 4 Section 2:

IV. 2. The State Security Organs and Terror

The first armed formations tasked with ensuring the security of the “Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government” in Petrograd and then in Moscow were the same ones that had fought for power for them: the insurgent units of the old army, especially groups of sailors from the Baltic Fleet and detachments of the Red Guard. They stood guard in front of the Smolny Institute, initially ready for an attack by counter-revolutionary troops, and later they shielded the Moscow Kremlin. The dissolution of the old army and the formation of a new one went hand in hand from the end of December 1917; the fundamental difference was first the abolition of all seniorities and ranks as well as all medals and decorations; in the revolutionary army of the Russian Republic, free and equal citizens—proletarians by social origin—were to meet in voluntary obedience and command themselves through soldiers’ committees. It became clear very quickly that this army did not deserve its name and had no chance of prevailing against the resistance of the remnants of the old army or even against the German troops. Thus, from March onwards, the Red Army under War Commissar Leon Trotsky was modeled on the Tsarist army rather than on that of the Red Guards, and soon the majority of its commanders consisted of former officers. But it was a few Latvian regiments of staunch Bolsheviks who, in July 1918, rescued the Lenin’s government from the uprising of the Left Social Revolutionaries, and the army as a whole retained the original party character. For a long time, in the vicissitudes of the civil war, a clear separation between internal and external, between armed forces and special security forces, could hardly be made anyway. Almost all the senior commanders were party members, and quite a few of them—such as the Lithuanian peasant’s son Jeronim Uborevich—had played a major role in organizing the Red Guards; war commissars had been placed as the party envoys alongside the former officers, and party leaders who, like Trotsky and Stalin, had never had any military training, occupied the top positions. It was Trotsky who, in August 1918, ordered the establishment of the first concentration camps and who, in an attempt to deter former Tsarist officers from defecting to the Whites, had their wives and children treated as hostages and shot if necessary. Nevertheless, during the first few months after the seizure of power, a distinction had to be made between internal and external security, since during November and December 1917 the government of the People’s Commissars was threatened far more by the strikes of ministry officials and bank employees than by military action. Nobody did as much to end this strike as Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the co-founder of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. A devoted follower of the Catholic Church as a young man, the son of Polish nobles had transferred all the fervor of his faith to the revolutionary movement and, like Rosa Luxemburg, had written very beautiful and sentimental letters from prison or exile; but since, besides children. he loved only humanity, he was not even surpassed by Lenin in determination to defend the proletarian revolution against all its enemies. The Council of People’s Commissars was therefore well advised when on December 7, 1917 it created the “Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage,” and placed Dzerzhinsky at its head. Called “Cheka” or “Vetcheka” from its initials, the new authority first made a name for itself by arresting large numbers of right-wing Social Revolutionaries and forcibly eliminating anarchist centers in Moscow. For this they needed their own troops and their own executive power. It received both and gave away neither. But until July 1918 it was content with the administrative shooting of criminals, since several of the members of the supreme body were like Social Revolutionaries who objected to the imposition of political death sentences. In fact, Maxim Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizny, which contains so many accusations and complaints, hardly ever mentions the Cheka until it was banned in June 1918. But it was precisely the left-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Cheka who were responsible for the murder of the German Ambassador Mirbach, and Cheka troops were also involved in the uprising of July 6-7. They even arrested Dzerzhinsky for a short time, but the will to seize power for their party was absent. In this respect, the real history of the Cheka may only begin with the sole rule of Dzerzhinsky and his international circle of collaborators—the Latvians Martin Latsis and Jēkabs Peterss, the Jews Józef Stanisławowicz Unschlicht and Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, the Russian Mikhail Kedrov and the German Roller—but it was probably symptomatic that together with the first criminal, his mistress was executed without further ado. So it was only logically consistent that after the assassination attempts on Uritzki and Lenin on August 30, the Cheka did not act as an investigative authority in order to identify the accomplices of Leonid Kanegisser and Fannija Kaplan among the Socialist Revolutionaries, but rather, with its hostage shootings, represented only the tip of that elementary savagery which, for example, appeared in the following appeal of an army committee, signed by Smilga and others: “We appeal to the arbiters of Petrograd: comrades, beat the right-wing Social Revolutionaries without mercy, without pity, there is no need for courts and tribunals. Let the anger of the workers rage, the blood of the right-wing Social Revolutionaries and White Guards shall flow, physically exterminate the enemies!” Thus, when the Cheka shot “administratively,” it was only continuing the line of this call, which gives an idea of what was happening in the vastness of Russia in terms of lawless acts of violence that were sanctioned and encouraged from above. And the Cheka only fixed the specific, collectivist thinking of the party when it directed its blows not only against the possibly guilty party of Socialist Revolutionaries, but against the “main enemy” allegedly behind it, namely “the bourgeoisie.” Martin Latsis thus formulated the basic conception of the party in a particularly harsh manner when he wrote: “We are in the process of exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. You do not need to prove that this or that person acted against the interests of the Soviet power by word or deed. The first thing you have to ask an arrested person is: what class does he belong to, where is he from, what is his education and what is his profession? These questions should decide the fate of the accused. That is the quintessence of the Red Terror.” The pursuit of social being rather than individual action was therefore a distinctive feature of the Cheka only in a technical sense, and Stalin had good reason in 1927 to praise it as the “naked sword of the proletariat.” If the demand “a thousand (of them) for one (of us)” probably remained verbal, proportions of 150:1 were a reality, and it was almost a reconciliatory return to the principle guilt when a priest was shot because he held a memorial service for “Nikolay Romanov.” In all this, Dzerzhinsky and his closest collaborators were not acting out of personal cruelty, but they believed, in the spirit of the quote quoted earlier, that they were serving practical humanism and the highest goals of humanity. By all traditional standards they were criminals and mass murderers, but for them these crimes and mass murders were precisely the postulates of a higher, “revolutionary” morality that would definitively usher in the realm of justice and morality. They could not be dissuaded from their path even by the fact that, by their own admission, sadists and criminals rushed into their service and, full of that completely unlimited power which Lenin declared to be the essence of the proletarian dictatorship, committed deeds of indescribable horror, next to which the worst excesses of the White Terror faded. After 1924, anyone in the West who read the book by the respected historian and popular socialist S.P. Melgunov on the “Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923” must indeed have felt their blood run cold in their veins with horror. But not only the remote torture and killing sites in the provinces, but also the buildings of the Cheka headquarters on the Lubyanka in central Moscow soon became a place of terror, with reports circulating as early as the early 1920s that largely corresponded to Solzhenitsyn’s much later depictions. Even after the years of civil war, the Cheka had by no means disappeared, but had become firmly institutionalized and even increased in size. Certainly, after 1920 the Bolshevik Party regime still faced many and active enemies, and the Cheka uncovered a number of opposing organizations; however, it also violently ended numerous strikes because allegedly “enemies” were behind them. But what had emerged during the years of the civil war, the intelligence service with its departments assigned to the respective opponents, the border troops, the “internal troops” as an army alongside the Red Army and finally the special departments, from which that “traveling Cheka punitive expedition” was formed, which is said to have shot 6,000 “enemies” within three months in the city of Nikolayevsk on the Amur, which became more and more an end in itself, which no longer had anything extraordinary about it, but was a familiar and all-pervasive part of everyday life. Now conspiracies were being provoked instead of just being uncovered; agents and spies were sent all over the world in close if jealous cooperation with the Comintern, the Army Intelligence Service and the industrial commissariats; the borders of the Soviet Union were hermetically sealed and foreigners were arrested to be accused of sabotage or to be exchanged for arrested revolutionaries in Germany and elsewhere; it was considered a crime for a national to have any relations with independent foreigners; the whole country was covered with such a dense network of confidants and informers that even party members dared not say a careless word. As early as 1921, the Cheka controlled more than 100 concentration camps with around 60,000 prisoners. With the onset of collectivization, corrective labor camps increasingly became factors of significant economic importance, and great industrialization was driven not only by enthusiastic Komsomol members but also by millions of forced laborers. However, the name of the ultimately directing authority had changed. Not a few party members had expressed their concern when what appeared to be a civil war institution would not disappear after victory had been achieved, and when the People’s Commissar for Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, complained that the Communist Party appeared to be a workers’ party having become a warlike party of soldiers, some might go a step further and fear that the party might become an instrument of the secret police. So in 1922 the Cheka was renamed “GPU” and after the founding of the Soviet Union it was renamed “OGPU,” and the authority to carry out administrative shootings was withdrawn. However, almost all reports agree that practically nothing has changed in this matter because the GPU was able to evade the restrictions. Rather, as a result of the temporary factional struggles, new tasks were assigned to it, because party comrades were now obliged to report to the GPU and to the Central Committee on all factional activities of which they became aware. But here, too, the GPU knew how to produce what it wished to discover, and Trotsky bitterly complained in 1928 that a GPU agent contact took up with the opposition and then was “unmasked to be a Wrangel officer.”

In 1934 the OGPU was finally merged with the Internal Commissariat (“NKVD”), but this merger with the ordinary police and internal administration worked out to the advantage of the political secret police, since their chief, Genrikh Yagoda, took over the management of the new agency. The Great Purge all but wiped out the Chekist old guard, as well as the army’s rival overseas intelligence agency, the GRU. But even though the purgers, Yezhov’s people, were almost all executed, the NKVD was as powerful as ever under its new chief, Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s Georgian compatriot. The “reconnaissance department” rebuilt its legal and illegal residencies abroad, the “secret political administration” monitored the entire inner life of the Soviet Union and probably also organized the extensive deportations from the newly acquired areas of Poland and the border states. The GULag department administered the army of millions of enslaved laborers and other prisoners who were scattered across the Soviet Union in about 80 concentration camp-systems of 20-100 individual camps each, and on the eve of the war Beria commanded not only the border and transport troops and numerous NKVD schools, but also those blocking formations designed to operate behind the front lines and shoot down any soldier who might flee the battlefield. But not much of Dzerzhinsky’s ascetic belief apparently remained in the higher ranks: reports of the luxurious furnishings of the offices of high GPU officials were already numerous in the early 1930s, and when Beria was called “monster” in Soviet publications after his execution in 1953, this statement apparently referred to his private life as well. In any case, by 1934 the former “Extraordinary Commission” had grown into a gigantic apparatus of professional policemen and special soldiers, and that must have alienated to any reader of Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” where socialism still was traditionally equated with the abolition of (professional) army and civil service.

The police force of National Socialist Germany also had a particularly close relationship with the party, more precisely with one of its branches, the SS, and it was also a formidable apparatus in 1939, but this fact was not incompatible with the basic ideological approach of National Socialism. The “Reich Security Main Office” which was established in September 1939, in which the “Security Police” (i.e. the Secret State Police and the Criminal Police) and the “Security Service” (i.e. the intelligence organization) were united under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, was not, like the former GPU, the most important part of the Ministry of the Interior, but had retained its independence and formal authority to issue instructions to Heinrich Himmler as the “Chief of the German Police.” Unlike in the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht was not a party army, and at no time were there calls “from the front” along the lines of appeals of Smilga and others to the Petrograd workers just cited. On the contrary, from the very beginning the Wehrmacht served exclusively for the external security of the state, and as late as 1937 many a general might have been of the opinion that the purpose of the National Socialist movement was to guarantee the security of the Wehrmacht, i.e. it made possible the restoration of military freedom, which Versailles deprived from what was once the best army in the world. Even the victory over France, which was largely Hitler’s triumph, did not change the fact that the Wehrmacht was remarkably free from direct influence of the party and especially of the SS, although numerous young officers felt closely connected to the party.

The existence of the SS, on the other hand, was based on its relationship with the party leader and protagonist of the ideology, and there was no parallel to this in Russia or the Soviet Union either before 1917 or after 1917. In 1923 the “Stoßtrupp Hitler” had been set up as a bodyguard and shock troop, and after Hitler’s release from captivity in 1925 a “Staff Guard” was formed from a few completely reliable people under the leadership of Julius Schreck. A little later, similar squads also existed in other places, and the term “Schutzstaffeln” came into use. The primary task remained securing the leadership of the party, and after the pronouncement of the verdict in the Leipzig “Cheka Trial” and various other revelations about the terrorist and military apparatus of the Communist Party of Germany, protective measures of this kind seemed all too appropriate. However, the realm of pragmatic expediency was soon exceeded. In January 1929, Heinrich Himmler took over as “Reichsführer SS” and quickly gave his organization its own face by emphasizing the idea of elites, races and settlements. The aim was to build up a community of “healthy Germanic clans” for which the so-called “marriage order” was to provide the basis: not primarily the economy, as with the Marxist socialists, but procreation should be wrested from subjective arbitrariness and made the subject of well-considered planning, since the damage and corruption of civilization could not be eliminated in any other way, the high point of which for Himmler, as numerous statements show, was unmistakably the revolution of 1918 with its “bad-breed” of soldiers’ council types. From autumn 1931 onwards, Reinhard Heydrich, a discharged naval officer, set up a “defense service” from the humblest of beginnings, which after the seizure of power was given the name “Reichsführer SS Security Service” (“SD”). As Reich Chancellor, Hitler again set up a very personal protection force, which developed into the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.” More important for the SS’s later position of power was the fact that, unlike the SA, early on it was able to penetrate the state sphere, and more consistently, the police force. The SA, because it was much larger and more important, would have had to take over the Reichswehr, and according to traditional concepts that would have meant a genuine revolution; the far more inconspicuous way of the SS corresponded much better to the new type of fascist revolution. The individual stages of this seizure of power within the larger seizure of power are not to be traced here; in any case, Himmler, as “Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior,” had been the de facto Minister of Police of the Third Reich since June 1936, and under him Heydrich held the most important powers as the commander of the security police and the intelligence service. Thus, on the one hand, the trend towards centralization that had already been noticeable during the Weimar period had reached a logical climax, albeit one that was still unimaginable in Weimar, and on the other hand, a merging of party and state offices had already been created according to the official designation, to which only the “Führer and Reich Chancellor” himself was an equivalent. The question was: would the SS become the state or would the police become the party? That the second possibility was the more likely one was already proven by the development of the concentration camps since 1933. Theodor Eicke, as the commander of the nominally state-owned Dachau camp, obviously felt himself first and foremost as an SS leader, and if he sought to fill his men with an inextinguishable hatred of the prisoners as “enemies of the state,” these enemies of the state were for him first and foremost the enemies of the party. When he shot the SA Chief of Staff on Hitler’s direct orders on July 1, 1934, he had become, as it were, a “state murderer” as the executor of an extra-state Führer order, and one may speak of a characteristic parallel to the postulate “no courts and no tribunals,” which was nevertheless different from the Soviet “mass terror” toto coelo (i.e. absolutely). After June 30, 1934, as a now independent subdivision of the NSDAP, the SS received permission to set up armed units, which as “disposal troops” were supposed to be a state security police and thus largely corresponded to the internal troops of the GPU or NKVD, although out of consideration for the Wehrmacht they were not given heavy weapons. A part of this state security police were the formations, which in April 1936 were placed under Theodor Eicke as the “leader of the SS Totenkopf Units and the KL (concentration camps)” and initially comprised five battalions. Even in 1939, however, the entire German concentration camp system was not even remotely comparable to the NKVD system, either in terms of the number of guards or the number of prisoners, or even in terms of economic importance; only the outbreak of war brought about a significant change. Until the beginning of the war against Poland, the future Waffen-SS was still relatively weak: it included the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the Standarte “Germania” in Hamburg, the Standarte “Der Führer” in Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt as well as various special assault battalions and the “Junker schools” in Tölz, Braunschweig and Klagenfurt. All in all, there were at most two divisions, and at the beginning of the war all units, with the sole exception of the guards, were incorporated into the Wehrmacht for the purpose of taking on combat tasks.

The general SS, the actual party structure, could not compete in importance with the police and the Waffen-SS, and as a whole the SS already presented a very diverse picture in 1939. But unity was nevertheless secured by basic ideological concepts: the Führer as absolute sovereign, “the Reich” as the goal, the task of destroying the enemy, and cultivating “good blood” as a purpose in life. Like Himmler, Heydrich understood this idea primarily as a counter-ideology to Bolshevism. In his 1935 writing “Changes in our Struggle” he chose the following formulations: “As everywhere in the life of nature, the life of peoples consists of the eternal struggle between the stronger, the noble, racially superior and the inferior, the subhuman… The struggle of our leader and the movement began at a time of camouflaged rule by subhumanity, which was on its way to open, all-destructive brutal rule through Bolshevism… The driving forces of the enemy remain eternally the same: world Jewry, world Freemasonry and a largely political priesthood... In their various ramifications and forms they persist in their objective of the destruction of our people ... As in every true struggle there are clearly only two options: either we finally overcome the opponent, or we perish.” Here, despite all the unfeigned feeling of strength and all claims to superiority, the defensive underpinning of the National Socialist expansion and its substantive contrast to the Bolshevik, indeed to the Marxist doctrine becomes clear with strong formal similarity: security, protection, preservation, order, but with the impetus of “all or nothing,” which, in conservative opinions, had hitherto only come to light in a verbal way and was far reminiscent of Lenin’s “Who-whom?” But no matter how obviously this view tends to see the Industrial Revolution negatively and equates “healthy life” with “peasant life,” it cannot be taken for granted that the term reactionary is sufficient to describe it. In a statement about the Waffen-SS in September 1940, Adolf Hitler once again voiced his very simple basic emotion when he said: “Such an association (as a state troop police force) will never, proud of its cleanliness, fraternize with the proletariat and the underworld that undermines the supporting idea,” and in this came that loss of meaning of the word “proletariat” that has meanwhile asserted itself everywhere in the western world, even where it has been taken up again in sentimental regression. Apparently Hitler did not equate “proletariat” with “workers” and his state troop police could not have been formed without a prior and far-reaching “democratization.” It is more likely, therefore, that two phenomena opposed each other with similar determination, equally distant from the basic Marxist notion of the “overwhelming majority” driven to socialism. In any case, it was an exact and hostile counterpart to Stalin’s quoted statement when Himmler, in his 1935 speech, called the SS a “merciless executioner’s sword” that would destroy the “Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of the subhuman” if it ever unleashed in Germany from without or from within.

Thus, before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, the two basic emotions of the First World War, the negative and the positive war experience, faced each other in the form of gigantic security and terror apparatuses, and the question was whether they were equally consistent in developing these institutions. But as an apparatus, the Soviet one was older and, by all accounts, more original, for it stood before the eyes of its German enemies as a reality and, in a way, as a model. In a speech in January 1937, Himmler referred to his “most exact knowledge of Bolshevism.” When Walter Schellenberg had to organize the security of Hitler’s visit to Italy in April 1938, he chose for his secret service men “the Russian system of cooperation of three people each,” and in July 1941 Hitler had him ordered to set up a strong intelligence system in Russia “which is in no way inferior to the NKVD.”

The reports on Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, which could be read in the right-wing press up to 1933, and the books which were distributed in large editions by the “Anticomintern” publishing house after the National Socialists takeover, were propagandistic and one-sided, but they deviated less from reality than most of the fellow-travelers’ accounts and agreed in the main with a considerable part of the not overtly anti-communist literature. Between 1939 and 1941 there was also direct cooperation between the security organizations of the Soviet Union and Germany, and there is no indication that the Gestapo felt it was the older and more experienced organization.

In fact, it would be unjustified to claim that the SS and the Reich Security Main Office dominated Germany in 1939 or even early 1941 as completely as the NKVD, Stalin’s instrument, dominated the Soviet Union. Not only was the average standard of living of the population considerably higher, but important parts of the liberal system had been preserved in considerable remnants in Germany: one was a regulated but still relatively free economy, which offered shelter to numerous opponents of the regime; a Wehrmacht in which there were no party cells and certainly no “special departments” of the political police; a judiciary that not infrequently still displayed a considerable degree of independence; churches that often meant their own country’s regime when they preached against the concentration camps of the Soviet Union. As totalitarian as Germany appeared in 1939 alongside England and France, it had to appear liberal to anyone who could make a genuine comparison with the Soviet Union. This also applied to the concentration camps and not only from a quantitative point of view. When the former communist and Deputy People’s Commissar Karl Albrecht was released by the GPU to Germany in 1934 and immediately taken into custody again by the Gestapo, he noticed above all “the exemplary hygiene and cleanliness” and a nightmare fell away from him when he saw that he no longer needed to hear “nightly screams of death.” And Margarete Buber-Neumann, Heinz Neumann’s wife, who was handed over to the Gestapo by the NKVD in 1939 along with many other former communists, asked herself in disbelief: “And this is supposed to be a concentration camp?” when she was taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and saw the flowerbeds that had been planted just beyond the entrance. She realized very soon that she had not been placed in a convalescent home, nor even in an analogue of the NKVD model Sokolniki prison in Moscow; the “Siberian conditions” under which she had lived in the Soviet Union were, in her opinion, far worse.

But she might have added that she never saw a poster containing a counter-slogan to the inscription that the German student Kindermann had seen fifteen years earlier in the Lubyanka: “Long live the GPU, the vanguard of the world revolution!” It was characteristic that Hitler and Himmler saw no advantage in the continued liberality of German existence, but only weakness and imperfection. In fact, it resulted to a large extent from the peace that prevailed in Germany after 1933. But the period of peace was only the first half of the National Socialist regime, and probably the less characteristic on. The National Socialist regime had not had to assert itself in any armed civil war, but Adolf Hitler told the generals in no uncertain terms in 1939 that he had not raised the Wehrmacht in order not to fight, and the foresight of war, beyond all protestations of peace, was a basic fact already from the years 1933-1937. Admittedly, even the Bolsheviks did not believe that their ultimate goals could be achieved without war, and their “socialism” could be called, with good reason, a continuation of the war economy with different means. Only in war would both regimes become fully comparable and perhaps prove to be unequal in other ways. Therefore, while a comparison of structures and conditions as they existed in 1939 is permissible, it cannot be exhaustive. The strained artificiality of a counter-belief that sought to trace all wars and struggles back to the machinations of “international Jewry,” although it saw in these wars and struggles the essence of life, was already all too evident in 1939. But Hitler and Himmler attributed the difficulties they encountered in reality to the persistence of reaction and pinned their hopes on youth. It was therefore no coincidence that there were particularly close ties between the SS and the Hitler Youth. But even Lenin, in the last years of his life, had all but given up hope that his generation would still live to see the “victory of the world proletariat,” and in the Soviet Union the youth organization of the party took over “sponsorships” over certain parts of the Red Army. In addition to the security organs, the youth organizations were the most important subdivisions of both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the NSDAP.