brought before him. Thälmann confirmed that he was being
maltreated. Göring had the manhandling stopped and boasted
that ten years later, in , the grateful Communist wrote to
thank him. (Göring might have added that in August a
phone call from Himmler sufficed to have Thälmann shot.)
Göring had the dubious honor of having founded not
only the concentration-camp penal system but also the Gestapo,
the secret state police. The latter creation had come about after
his friend Admiral Magnus von Levetzow, the police chief of
Berlin, had raised his voice against the brutality of the SA; Ernst
Röhm, whom Hitler had appointed his SA “chief of staff,” and
the Berlin SA commander Karl Ernst, had hit back at the admi-
ral, pointing out that he was not a Nazi party man and should
accordingly be replaced immediately. While protecting Levet-
zow as long as he could, Göring had as a precaution transferred
the admiral’s political police department (“a”) to his own Prus-
sian Ministry of the Interior, as the first step in fact toward es-
tablishing his own Hausmacht or private army, loyal only to
him. This was how Rudolf Diels, at that time head of Depart-
ment a, came to Göring’s staff although he was already the
ministry’s specialist on “political extremism.”
On April , Göring appointed Diels, a sallow six-footer of
thirty-two with slicked-back, dark brown hair and an assort-
ment of dueling scars, as his deputy, in charge of the secret state
police, shortly to be known and feared as the Gestapo. Under
Göring and Diels, the Gestapo, staffed primarily with lawyers
and intellectuals, became a precision instrument in the fight
against political opponents. “I founded it originally,” Göring
explained to Shuster in , “on the model of other [coun-
tries’] state police forces, and solely to combat Communists.” Di-
els would testify to the British in that he received most of
his orders for the “elimination” (Ausschaltung) of political op-