Goering himself has boasted:
“Numerous titles and honors have been bestowed on me during the past months, and still no title and no decoration could make me so proud, as the designation, given to me by the German people: ‘The most faithful paladin of our Fuehrer.’ In that, my relationship to the Fuehrer finds expression. I followed him for over a decade with unreserved faith, and I will follow him with the same unconditional faith until my end.” (3251-PS)
(b) Prussia, 1933-36. Immediately after the 30th of January 1933, Goering was awarded the key post of acting Prussian Minister of the Interior, and shortly thereafter, that of Minister President of Prussia. In these capacities, he proceeded promptly to establish a regime of terror in Prussia designed to suppress all opposition to the Nazi program.
His chief tool was the Prussian police, which remained under his jurisdiction until 1936. As early as February 1933, he ordered the entire police forces to render unqualified assistance to the para-military organizations supporting the new government, such as the SA and the SS, and to crush all political opponents with firearms, if necessary, regardless of the consequences. (Directive of 10 February 1933, Ministerialblatt fuer die Preussische innere Verwaltung 1933, p. 148; Directive of 17 February 1933, id, p. 169). Goering has frequently and proudly acknowledged his own personal responsibility for the crimes committed pursuant to orders of this character:
“I declared at that time before thousands of fellow Germans, each bullet which leaves the barrel of a police pistol now is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered; I ordered all this, I back it up. I assume the responsibility, and I am not afraid to do so.” (2324-PS; 3252-PS.)
Soon after he became Prussian Minister President, Goering began to develop the Gestapo, or Secret State Police. To quote from his own book:
“The most important thing for me was first, to get the instrument of power of the protective police and political police firmly in my hand. Here I undertook the first sweeping changes of personnel. Of the 32 available colonels of the protective police, I dismissed 22. Hundreds of officers and thousands of sergeants followed them in the course of the next months. New forces were procured, and everywhere, these forces were taken out of the large reserve pool of the SA and the SS.
“For weeks, I personally worked on this transformation, and finally I created alone and from my own conviction and own thought the ‘Secret State Police Office’. That instrument, feared so much by the enemies of the state, which above all has contributed so much, that today a Communist or Marxist danger in Germany or Prussia is hardly worth talking about anymore.” (3251-PS)
In a public address delivered on 11 December 1934, Goering boasted:
“We were firmly determined after assumption of power to hit the Communists so that in Germany they would never recover from our blow. For that we do not require a Reichstag fire. That has been one of the most important points on our program. In the former Weimar Constitution the destruction of Communism was unthinkable. For the execution of these measures we needed the instrument of a through and through reliable, and of the highest degree powerful, police force. I have created this instrument through the reorganization of the field police (Landespolizei) and the formation of a Secret State Police. These organizations will constitute a means for implanting fear in all enemies of the State, which a State needs if it wishes to defend itself for always”. (3440-PS)