Third Reich Day by Day: February 1936

The Olympic Games gave Nazi Germany a chance to show the world that the Third Reich was a well-ordered, powerful society. For propaganda purposes measures against Jews were relaxed, and Berlin became the home of fraternal international friendship, albeit temporarily. However, away from the Olympics the Germans re-occupied the demilitarized Rhineland and began to channel military aid to the Franco’s Nationalists fighting a civil war in Spain. As they did so, Great Britain and France, the major powers of Europe, did nothing but watch idly.

February

SS, Gestapo

The Gestapo is given national status with Heydrich as its head.

Potsdam Naval Academy, which in 1936 was producing personnel to crew such ships as the new Admiral Graf Spee.
Potsdam Naval Academy, which in 1936 was producing personnel to crew such ships as the new Admiral Graf Spee.

On October 5, 1931, Heydrich became a member of the SS and after a short spell at the Brown House, decided to set up the SD out of the view of enquiring eyes. Certainly from this time on Heydrich experienced a meteoric rise, becoming the second most powerful man in the RSHA. Heydrich’s ancestry was in SS terms questionable, however; his father had been listed in the Lexicon of Music and Musicians under Heydrich’s real name Süss, a clear indication that he was Jewish. However, investigations carried out into this later tended to indicate that Süss was in fact not Jewish. It is said that Heydrich had erased the name Sarah from his mother’s gravestone because of its Jewish connotations.

4 February

Switzerland, Nazi Party

Wilhelm Gustloff was born in Schwerin and went to live in Davos, Switzerland. He joined the Ausland Organization of the NSDAP in 1929 and went on to found his own group in Davos in 1931. On this day David Frankfurter, a Jewish student, murders him in a Davos Hotel.

The body of Wilhelm Gustloff was brought back to his home town of Schwerin for burial. Gustloff is declared a martyr of the Nazi movement.

Frankfurter was found guilty and imprisoned, since there was no capital punishment in Switzerland.