Out of Night & Fog

GESTAPO: INSTRUMENT OF TYRANNY (275 pp.) -- Edward Crankshaw -- Viking ($3.75).

The great function of the Nuernberg trials was not the often disputed function of pinning the guilt for World War II on a few top Nazis. A decade removed from those victorious and, perhaps, vindictive days, it becomes increasingly clear that the most important function of Nuernberg was the amassing of a vast amount of firsthand evidence on exactly what activated the Third Reich. It was Hitler's idea that the whole Nazi organization would, like millions of its victims, dis, appear into Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) if he failed, and to.this end, just : before the finish of World War II, the records of his infamous regime were deliberately and almost totally destroyed. The International Military Tribunal, by collecting surviving documents, confessions of leading participants and the evidence of witnesses and victims, was able to circumvent this final act of Nazi nihilism. The 50 volumes of its proceedings (about 24,000 pages) are more painful reading than most can bear, even today, but in them, far more than in the memoirs of statesmen and generals or the official regimental histories and the reminiscences of Panzer generals, are embedded the true nature of Naziism and the cause of World War II. Of the many valuable historical works that have drawn on these sources in recent years the latest is Edward Crankshaw's Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny, a chillingly felt, warmly told, and concise study of the main lever of Nazi power.

Twelve Years, Twelve Million. The word Gestapo was the creation of an anonymous postoffice clerk who used it as an abbreviation for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), Hermann Goring's name for the gang of Luger-toting bully boys who accompanied him into the

Ministry of the Interior after Hitler's legal takeover of the German state in 1933. Next year the Gestapo, which never exceeded 40,000, became a part of Heinrich Himmler's black-uniformed SS (Schutz Staff el) and Reinhard ("The Hangman") Heydrich's intelligence branch of the same outfit, the dreaded SD (Sicherheitsdienst). Hitler deliberately confused the powers and duties of these services in order to divide and control Himmler, Heydrich and other aides who never ceased to intrigue against each other and frequently arrested and killed weaker rivals. But Gestapo remained the generic term for the instrument which (according to Nuernberg estimates) in twelve years destroyed twelve million people.

As an authority on Soviet affairs, Journalist (London Observer) and Author (Cracks in the Kremlin Wall) Crankshaw has had ample occasion to study political terror. But when he turned from the Communists' MVD to the Nazis' Gestapo, he found a vast difference in attitudes. There was a mechanical ingenuity to Gestapo methods of torture (a small machine for crushing testicles), and a pseudo-scientific slant to many of their regular duties (victims with perfect teeth were withheld from the incinerators in order to provide the Nazis with perfect skulls for paperweights; the heads of dead Jewish Communist commissars were pickled for an anthropological collection of "subhumans"). Whereas the Russians' prime concern seemed to be confessions of self-guilt, the Germans tortured mainly to extract admissions of others' guilt. When justice finally caught up with an MVD man he usually went stoically to his death, but at Nuernberg many Gestapomen wept and whimpered.

The Wehrmacht Knew. The majority of the Gestapo's victims were Jews. But obedience to Hitler's perverted racial laws did not prevent cynical Gestapo bosses from trading thousands of Jewish lives for money or political advantages. In Poland and the Ukraine, where there were not enough tank ditches, and natural ravines were used to pack in the naked bodies of millions of massacred men, women and children, the SD Action Groups were full of self-pity for their exacting task. Crankshaw notes that volunteer groups from Lithuania and the Ukraine were only too ready to help out the SS, and he demolishes the argument that the Wehrmacht knew nothing of this hideous slaughter.

Crankshaw provides vivid portraits of the top Gestapo men, in particular Himmler, whose mild, chinless exterior concealed a capable administrator, a ruthless intriguer, and the greatest mass murderer of all time. Towards the end of World War II, ambitious for absolute power, Himmler made the mistake of reaching out for just one more life. But that life was Hitler's; Himmler took potassium cyanide. Gestapo is a bold and worthwhile attempt to understand something of these monstrous men and of their strange decade, but in fact it explains very little. The mass of evidence in the Nuernbergr records may have to wait a long time for its rightful historian. In Poland

Himmler comforted his self-pitying SS men with the words: "This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written." What glory, at what a price!

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