recruits had to buy their own uniforms. Many of his opponents within the Nazi Party feared that one day Himmler or his henchmen might, with only the flick of a finger, use their unchallengeable powers of arrest and detention on their political rivals. But he deftly slipped his enemies’ financial leash. He loved imaginative but untried projects and had started out in life as a breeder of prize chickens (the enterprise failed). As Reichsfuehrer SS, Himmler put his organization into business for itself. By 1939 the SS was running four companies: one used concentration camp labor to manufacture bread-making machinery and cutlery; another managed forests and farms; a third produced SS uniforms at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp; and the largest turned out brick and granite for the grand reconstruction Hitler was planning for Berlin. (According to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later his minister of war production, the bricks were useless because the SS employed a new process that failed, and the granite cracked because the slave laborers were ill-trained and badly led.) Cash was also donated by forty wealthy businessmen styling themselves Himmler’s
Freundeskreis
(Circle of Friends). On August 27, 1943, for example, the list of donors included the three major German banks, steelworks such as Flick, Rheinmetall, and Siemens Electric. The biggest corporations each had given 100,000 reichsmarks. They neither sought nor received an accounting of their monthly contributions, although Himmler personally checked on their attendance at regular monthly meetings.
So ambitious was Himmler for power that the money went into his organization and not his own pocket; his personal cash shortage remained chronic. In 1942 he had to beg for a loan of 80,000 marks in Party funds to buy a house for his pregnant mistress and secretary, Hedwig Potthast. Meanwhile, the SS acquired more than forty businesses. The profits equipped, trained, and fielded thirty-eight divisions operating as shock troops, sometimes independent of the military high command. SS funds also underwrote the plan to murder Europe’s Jews, which was code-named
Aktion Reinhard
in memory of Heydrich and actually diverted resources from the war effort.
But there was one particularly weak link in the financial structure of the SS. Aside from stolen gold, most of which passed through a special Reichsbank account, none of these enterprises earned the foreign currency that is essential to the reach of any espionage service if it is to find useful information. Looted gold from the central banks of conquered Europe would soon run out, and most of the wealthy Jews of France, Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia were being squeezed as dry as their German brothers. In the East, almost all Jews were as poor as their own governments. By the start of 1944, when the SS death camps were in full and monstrous operation, wedding rings pulled from the fingers of Jews, gold and diamond jewelry ripped from their necks, and gold crowns yanked from the mouths of their murdered bodies yielded only 178 million reichsmarks ($70 million at the wartime rate of exchange). That had to be deposited in a special Reichsbank account, and even Himmler suspected that millions more had been stolen by his own men.
Precisely who had the idea of reviving the operation to counterfeit English pound notes is not certain — such things rarely are — but all evidence points to Schellenberg. He ran the SS foreign intelligence service in direct competition to the Abwehr, the espionage arm of the German military which also regarded itself as a state within a state; the Abwehr was headed by Heydrich’s old mentor and then rival, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Heydrich took Schellenberg to lunch with Canaris the day before he gave his protégé command of SS foreign intelligence. The junior guest was eventually to swallow the senior when the Abwehr was absorbed by the SS.
Schellenberg’s memoirs devote a
Freundeskreis
(Circle of Friends). On August 27, 1943, for example, the list of donors included the three major German banks, steelworks such as Flick, Rheinmetall, and Siemens Electric. The biggest corporations each had given 100,000 reichsmarks. They neither sought nor received an accounting of their monthly contributions, although Himmler personally checked on their attendance at regular monthly meetings.
So ambitious was Himmler for power that the money went into his organization and not his own pocket; his personal cash shortage remained chronic. In 1942 he had to beg for a loan of 80,000 marks in Party funds to buy a house for his pregnant mistress and secretary, Hedwig Potthast. Meanwhile, the SS acquired more than forty businesses. The profits equipped, trained, and fielded thirty-eight divisions operating as shock troops, sometimes independent of the military high command. SS funds also underwrote the plan to murder Europe’s Jews, which was code-named
Aktion Reinhard
in memory of Heydrich and actually diverted resources from the war effort.
But there was one particularly weak link in the financial structure of the SS. Aside from stolen gold, most of which passed through a special Reichsbank account, none of these enterprises earned the foreign currency that is essential to the reach of any espionage service if it is to find useful information. Looted gold from the central banks of conquered Europe would soon run out, and most of the wealthy Jews of France, Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia were being squeezed as dry as their German brothers. In the East, almost all Jews were as poor as their own governments. By the start of 1944, when the SS death camps were in full and monstrous operation, wedding rings pulled from the fingers of Jews, gold and diamond jewelry ripped from their necks, and gold crowns yanked from the mouths of their murdered bodies yielded only 178 million reichsmarks ($70 million at the wartime rate of exchange). That had to be deposited in a special Reichsbank account, and even Himmler suspected that millions more had been stolen by his own men.
Precisely who had the idea of reviving the operation to counterfeit English pound notes is not certain — such things rarely are — but all evidence points to Schellenberg. He ran the SS foreign intelligence service in direct competition to the Abwehr, the espionage arm of the German military which also regarded itself as a state within a state; the Abwehr was headed by Heydrich’s old mentor and then rival, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Heydrich took Schellenberg to lunch with Canaris the day before he gave his protégé command of SS foreign intelligence. The junior guest was eventually to swallow the senior when the Abwehr was absorbed by the SS.
Schellenberg’s memoirs devote a
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