His cleverness seems to have been confined to a highly developed instinct for self-preservation, which, however, proved in the end, inadequate, and he was hanged in Prague in 1946. In those early days in Berlin he pinned his faith to Himmler and kept fairly quiet. Throughout his dreary little career he seems never to have taken a decision of his own but always to have acted as the literal-minded and joyless administrator of the death and torture sanctioned by his superiors.