Gestapo by Edward Crankshaw Page B

acquaintance with its leaders, may have deliberately left himself several lines open. We do not know. All we know is that a man with Diels’ established record cannot justly complain if, when in doubt, we believe the worst of him. Certainly on that winter’s night Captain Packebusch of the S.S. had broken into the flat of the Chief of the Gestapo in the hope of discovering incriminating documents linking him with Communist leaders. He failed, and Diels acted with resolution.
    As soon as he had decided whom he was dealing with he telephoned an old friend, Commandant of the Tier-garten Police Station, a man “who had often helped me in the past, and was not afraid of his chief, Daluege.” The old friend responded, and, within an hour, the house in the Potsdamer Strasse, where Packebusch “carried on his unholy activities at Daluege’s behest,” was surrounded by members of the uniformed police, armed with hand grenades and automatics. Diels, according to his own account, himself stepped forward to knock on the door. An S.S. sentry opened, and, taking Diels and the little group at his heels for friends, showed them the way to Packebusch’s rooms, Diels still leading.
    â€œI chose to expose myself in this affair,” he writes, “because, in the last resort, it was my own personal interest that was at stake. The most dangerous part of the enterprise now lay before me: the arrest by my own hand of the worst of the gangsters.”
    It was a dramatic moment. There, in the small hours, sat the S.S. Captain—
    â€œthe very prototype and image of the later concentration camp commandants, harshness and callousness written deep into his face. He sat there, brooding over the papers on his desk like a scholar working into the night.… They were my papers he was working on, and defacing, as I soon discovered, with inept annotations.…
    â€œPackebusch had no time to recover from his shock. He stared at me as though I were a ghost. As I said, ‘I’ve come to take you away,’ the uniformed police who had entered with me seized him without particular gentleness. They removed the pistol from the belt he had hung up on the wall with his black uniform jacket. Hisaccomplices, in turn, were seized in their own rooms.”
    But by the time Diels had got Packebusch to his own office on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse it was a different story. They started roaring and shouting defiance at each other. Diels threatened Packebusch with prison, and Packebusch threatened Diels with arrest for treason.
    â€œAs I jumped up to refute this insolence he pulled an automatic from his trousers’ pocket and pointed it at me, yelling unprintable obscenities. But before he could steady his aim and press the trigger the great Alsatian dog which had been observing the progress of the scene from his corner of the big room threw himself at the jackbooted thug.” [Diels, as usual, was in civilian clothes.] “Two policemen wrenched the weapon from his hands.”
    The upshot of that evening’s entertainment was that with Himmler protesting to Goering and calling for the blood of the Chief of the Gestapo, it looked as though the S.S. had won. But there were obscurities in the case, almost certainly involving scandals among the high and mighty of the Nazi Party. Diels was demoted, fled to Czechoslovakia, returned in triumph to a stronger position, himself accepted rank in the S. S., and managed to hold out against Heydrich for several months to come.
    While the police leaders fought each other for power, the work of the police went on. And always the Gestapo was being strengthened. These incidents in the lives of Gisevius and Diels are recorded here not for their own sakes but to illustrate the atmosphere inside Gestapo headquarters in its early days. To the outsider the building in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse was the headquarters of a smoothly functioning terror machine. To the victims it was a