Heydrich’s name is, of course, well known to anyone who is
well-read (or not even that well-read) in the history of Nazi Germany and the
Holocaust. But at the same time, he is ultimately a shadowy figure. Center
stage is taken by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich's subordinate Eichmann, who has become
one of the major symbols of Nazi evil not due to any rank held, but to his
responsibility for rounding up and dispatching millions of Jews to their deaths.
Despite the importance and centrality of Heydrich’s role, he appears somehow
always off screen, a mysterious phantom just tantalizingly out of reach of the
reader. I can think of no other prominent Nazi leader save Bormann of whom this
is true. But it was Heydrich who drew up the policies that Eichmann
implemented. He ordered ghettoization, the Jewish Councils (Judenräte), deportations, the creation and operations of the
mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen), the
marking of Germany’s Jews with the yellow star, and, the act for which he is perhaps most notorious, chaired the
Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was streamlined (I covered this in
my last post). But somehow he is always just
off-stage.
He stares
at us through narrow eyes in the official photographs, somehow blasting us
with that “Luciferian coldness” through the page (or computer screen) and over the distance of seven decades. I remember watching a scene in an old History Channel
documentary in which Heydrich is walking out of a building through a phalanx of
onlookers. He walks right up to the
camera and stares into it with such an intense and predatory look before turning
away that I was jolted from my seat, my heart jumping up to my throat. I had
recorded the program and rewound it back a couple of seconds. Sure enough, even
though I knew what was coming, every time Heydrich fixed me with that glance
(and I did feel that he was looking at me,
and even through me), my body gave the same biological response. In
watching this scene, my body was instinctively reacting not to a man, but to a
wild animal. When I saw the same couple of seconds being played on another
documentary that I was watching recently, the same thing happened – a fight or
flight reflex kicked in.
Who was this man? He was born in Halle an der Saale, northwest
of Leipzig in Saxony-Anhalt, on March 7, 1904. He was too young to fight in the
First World War, but the reverberations from that war certainly shaped his outlook.
His childhood was filled with revolutionary violence from the radical left, and
their violent suppression by the radical right, which certainly shaped his
later political views. His father, a composer, owned and operated a
conservatory. As Heydrich’s biographer Gerwarth explains, Heydrich’s father has
been unfairly untarnished as a third-rate composer in hindsight not because of
his actual musical talents or lack thereof, but because of the nefarious
reputation of his son. Heydrich himself was from a young child a talented
musician, playing violin concerts well into adulthood, supposedly playing Haydn
while sentimentally weeping. This from a man who ordered the deaths of millions
with a heart of granite (or “of iron”, as Hitler said admiringly at Heydrich’s
funeral in June 1942).
Heydrich’s father Bruno is not unimportant because a man who
felt slighted by Bruno accused him of being Jewish. This was not true. But
Bruno’s stepfather was named Süss, a common Jewish surname at the time. Süss
was not Bruno’s biological father, nor was he Jewish, but nonetheless rumors of
Jewish blood chased Bruno (and his son Reinhard) throughout the rest of his
life. Some have ascribed Heydrich’s later murderous anti-Semitism to being in
reaction to this false accusation of Jewish blood; perhaps he believed he was
Jewish, and in seeking relentlessly to destroy the Jews of Europe, he was in
fact really seeking to extinguish the Jew in himself. As in most psychoanalytical
history, this does not hold much water.
Heydrich, always fascinated with all things military and
grated by the fact that he had missed out on the Great War, joined the Navy at
the age of 18. There he was apparently an efficient officer although disliked
by his subordinates for his arrogant attitude. In a further sign of his
arrogance, he impregnated a lover and then refused to wed her; the woman’s
father brought him before a court of honor, which cashiered him, not so much
for the offense as for the high-handed demeanor with which he carried himself
in court.
Heydrich was, in fact, already engaged at that point, to his
future wife Lina von Osten, a decidedly Lady Macbeth-type figure. While
Heydrich at this point was fairly apolitical (although sympathetic to the parties
of the radical right), his wife was a convinced Nazi and came from a family of
others of like mind. After Heydrich was dismissed from his post as an
officer, he locked himself in his apartment and wept for days; this was a man
who had gloried in the uniform, and what would he do now for a career? He was
finished, he thought. This was, after all, the time of the Great Depression.
Through her connections, his fiancée was able to set up a meeting with the head
of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who was keen on setting up a counterintelligence
unit of his organization. Wrongly believing that Heydrich had been an
intelligence officer in the Navy (he had in fact been a communications officer), Himmler
agreed to meet with Heydrich and told the young man to demonstrate how he would
organize a spy agency. Heydrich drew up a plan based upon his knowledge of spy
novels and Himmler was impressed. Heydrich was hired and, drawn by the
quasi-military nature of the SS and happy to have a job again (and happy to
please his rabid Nazi of a wife), he accepted the position. This, born of largely if not entirely opportunistic motives, was to be the
watershed moment of what would become an almost unimaginably murderous career.
Heydrich worked around the clock, arriving at his desk very
early and only leaving very late, on an exceedingly modest salary. Nonetheless,
he seems to have found his passion. The SS intelligence service that he
created from scratch became known as the Sicherheitsdienst
(Security Service, or SD). Heydrich set about drawing up index cards of anyone
and everyone, enemies and even friends, gathering dirt on individuals to use later
in the pursuit of power. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Heydrich
deployed these index cards to round up leftist political opponents, who were
thrown into concentration camps such as Dachau. In 1934, he was a crucial player during the Night of the Long Knives, when the SS murdered key leaders of the SA to rid
Hitler of a potentially dangerous enemy to his right. Heydrich was instrumental
in drawing up the death lists in this purge. Later, he and Himmler were able to
take over the Bavarian police and, in April 1934, the Gestapo, which beforehand
had only operated in Prussia (albeit the largest German state) under the
auspices of Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring. In 1936, Himmler became the chief
of the police in every German state and with him came Heydrich, who took
operational control. He used his power as Gestapo chief to pre-emptively arrest
anyone who might be a threat to the Nazis, or anyone he might not like. He
incarcerated such individuals in concentration camps or even had them killed. While
Heydrich had almost complete sway over individuals outside of the concentration
camp gates, that is where his authority stopped – this hindrance later led
Heydrich to clash with Theodor Eicke, first commandant of Dachau and then head
of the entire concentration camp system.
After the Anschluss of
March 1938, in which Germany annexed Austria, Heydrich oversaw the forced emigration
of Austrian Jews, executed through the office of the aforementioned Eichmann.
At this point, Jews were not being forcibly deported to ghettos or camps, but
rather abroad – anywhere, just out of the Nazis’ hair. This was to be Eichmann’s
grooming before he deployed his considerable talents to transporting the Jews
to the gas chambers. Heydrich was also instrumental in the notorious pogrom of
Kristallnacht, which occurred throughout the Reich (including Austria) in November
1938. Heydrich ordered
that any fires raging in synagogues or Jewish shops or homes should not be
stopped unless if the flames endangered “Aryan” dwellings or places of business.
Jewish homes and shops could be destroyed, but not looted (we don’t want to
look like hooligans, after all!). As long as everything was “proper,” the
police were not to interfere with the pogrom. In the end, nearly 100 Jews were
murdered, hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned shops destroyed,
and 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps. In January 1939, Hermann Göring charged Heydrich with organizing a solution to the Jewish "question" within the Reich.
In order to begin what became the Second World War, Hitler
needed a pretext, even a flimsy one. Heydrich carried out a plan whereby
Polish-speaking SS men “captured” a German radio station on the German-Polish
border. The bodies of “Poles” were provided by dead concentration camp
prisoners. Using this staged incident as well as the supposed depredations of
Poles on ethnic Germans within Poland (some of which was factual), Hitler
launched his armies on September 1, 1939, beginning the Second World War. Following
the army into Poland were SS and police
units organized by Heydrich to fulfill the “cleansing” of Poland and the
extermination of its intelligentsia, including priests, lawyers, academics,
journalists, and others. The purpose was to destroy the Polish nation. Heydrich
had delicately come to an arrangement with the army such that these Einsatzgruppen technically worked under
military auspices but in reality took their orders directly from him, Heydrich.
After the conquest of Poland and the handover of control from military to
civilian authorities, Heydrich, acting on orders from Hitler and Himmler and
operating through Adolf Eichmann, began the diabolical re-engineering of
Poland. Poles and Jews were deported from western Polish territory annexed to
Germany to make room for ethnic Germans from the Baltic States and Ukraine. German-looking Polish children were stolen from their families and taken to Germany. Hundreds of thousands of people were affected by this.
Four weeks after the invasion of Poland, the Criminal Police
was merged with the Security Police (the Gestapo and the SD) to form the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich
Security Main Office, or RSHA), which was placed under Heydrich’s control,
effectively placing him at the center of the National Socialist spider web. In
Poland, Heydrich and his underlings, especially Eichmann, set about trying to “solve”
the “Jewish question.” Poland was the heart of European Jewry. Heydrich ordered
that the Jews be concentrated in ghettos in major cities near rail lines:
ghettos were duly set up in major cities such as Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź. At
first, he had Eichmann toy with various places to dump these Jews: first near
Lublin, in the eastern part of Nazi-occupied Poland, and then Madagascar, the
island off of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Both schemes came to naught. But in
the meantime, the Jews had been ghettoized, isolated from the rest of society,
and were forced to live on top of one another, with little food and much disease. No
“Final Solution” was yet in the offing, and the Jews were forced to stay in
these confined spaces. Later, accommodations were made for them in the yawning
maws of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.
In the run-up to the invasion of the Soviet Union in the
summer of 1941, Heydrich set about organizing new Einsatzgruppen, who would be much more murderous than their
forebears who had operated in Poland. They were ordered to murder all Comintern
members, medium- and senior-ranking Communist party and state officials, and
Jews in party and government posts. Because of the deliberate conflation of “Jew”
and “Communist” in Nazi propaganda, this meant that these mobile killing units
were essentially given carte blanche to kill any adult Jewish male. The Einsatzgruppen also made it their
business to prod local anti-Semites to murder Jews in frantic pogroms, such as
seen in Kaunas and Lviv, but to keep German “fingerprints” unseen so as to make
the pogroms seem purely local in origin. Later on, the Einsatzgruppen’s brief extended beyond adult Jewish males:
beginning particularly in August 1941, Jewish women and children were killed as well. In late August, 23,600 were murdered
in Kamenets Podolsky and, in September, 33,771 in the ravine of Babi Yar
outside of Kiev. These were only the most notorious of the massacres.
Heydrich was the primary author of all of this and when he visited his
commanders in the field, he urged more radical measures and a higher body
count.
Heydrich was in general one of the radical prods of the
regime, particularly when it came to the Jews. In August 1941, both he and
another fanatic, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, twisted Hitler’s arm to
first mark the Jews of the Reich and then to deport them. Hitler was hesitant.
He believed, as did so many Nazis, that Germany had never militarily lost the
First World War; rather, it had only lost because of the disintegration of the
home front, which the Nazis naturally blamed on Jews and socialists. Hitler was
terrified of rocking the boat at this juncture and refused to either mark or
deport the Jews. A month later, for whatever reason, he changed his mind –
Heydrich was successful in introducing the yellow star to the Reich Jews (which
he had first proposed at a meeting shortly after the Kristallnacht pogrom three years earlier). Furthermore, the Jews
were deported out of the Reich. Jews in places like Minsk and Riga were shot to
make room for the Reich Jews; beginning in December 1941, Jews from the Łódź
Ghetto were sent to Chełmno to make room for them and, beginning in spring 1942, the Jews of the Lublin
district to Bełżec and Sobibór.
In addition to his responsibilities as the head of the RSHA,
Heydrich was named the Acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia (essentially
the present-day Czech Republic) in September 1941 and was put up in Prague
Castle. This gave him direct access to Hitler, whereas previously he had to go through Himmler. He announced that his goal was to "Germanize this Czech garbage" and set about crushing the Czech resistance through the adept
use of carrots and sticks. The Czechs became quiescent and Heydrich, as was his
wont, became exceedingly arrogant and careless. This would cost him his life in
June 1942.
In November 1941, Heydrich had Eichmann send out invitations
to a conference in the affluent suburb of Berlin, Wannsee. After a delay, the
meeting convened on January 20, 1942. Its purpose was, essentially, to concretize Heydrich and the
SS’ role as the spearhead against the Jews. Other ministries were to grasp the
importance of the project and get in line. In this, the meeting was largely successful. During
the meeting, Heydrich said that Europe would be swept east to west of Jews, who
would be forced to work in labor columns building roads for the German armies
until they were dead. Anyone who survived this murderous work would be "dealt with accordingly": in other words, killed. Those incapable of working were implicitly to be
murdered. According to Eichmann, the methods of killing Jews were intimately discussed
at the meeting, scarcely 90 minutes long, at which the participants sipped
brandy. It was determined that 11 million Jews – in countries under Nazi
control, under the control of Germany’s allies, or in neutral/hostile countries
– were to be subjected to the Final Solution. While none of the death camps
(outside of the gas van station at Chełmno) were yet in operation, it was
menacingly clear what was meant by this. After Heydrich was assassinated in
Prague, Aktion Reinhard, comprising
the camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka and administered out of Lublin, was
named in his “honor.” These camps consumed some 1.7 million victims, predominantly
Polish Jews.
As Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich had come
to acquire a certain sense of international notoriety, appearing
on the cover of TIME Magazine in
caricature form surrounded by nooses (due to his nickname of The Hangman). In
addition, the Czech government-in-exile was feeling desperate to prove its
worth to the Allies so that, after the defeat of the Nazis, it would get a
proper seat at the table and its country would be able to win its independence
(alas, it was to fall under crushing Communist rule until 1989). A Czech and
Slovak team was trained by British special forces with the specific purpose of assassinating the ghoul ruling from Prague Castle. The team was later
parachuted into Bohemia. After observing Heydrich and discovering his
patterns, they attacked on May 27, 1942, firing guns and throwing grenades at
Heydrich’s vehicle as he commuted to work. Like a horror movie villain,
Heydrich jumped out of the car and chased his assassins, firing his pistol
until he collapsed in pain. After a week of agony, Heydrich expired in a Prague
hospital on June 4.
Hitler and Himmler spoke at his funeral, singing his praises
as the ideal National Socialist, the “man with the iron heart” who could hardly
be replaced. Hitler fumed at Heydrich’s idiocy and arrogance, driving through the
streets of Prague with his car’s top down. He threatened to unleash hell in
response, and he did. The Nazis got (false) information that a village outside of
Prague, called Lidice, had harbored Heydrich’s killers. The entire male
population of Lidice above the age of 16 was lined up and shot; the women were
sent to concentration camps; and children, if of “suitable” racial appearance,
were sent to German families or, if not, gassed at Chełmno. The village itself
was destroyed: its buildings were demolished, and then the ruins detonated; the
Nazis even salted the earth. A similar fate met another village, Lezaky. Thousands
of people were executed to sate the Nazi bloodlust which was, in fact,
insatiable.
wack
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