Hitler's Hangman (14 page)

friend Erich Schultze came to a similar conclusion when he met Reinhard

during a brief visit to Halle. ‘We were all certain that he would go far in

the navy because of his ambition and ability. He was never content with

what he had achieved. His impulse was always for more; to do better; to

go higher. As a lieutenant he was already dreaming of becoming an

admiral.’94

While his relationship with the other young officers improved substan-

tially, Heydrich began to display a noticeable arrogance towards his

subordinates – something that would increase even further during the

1930s. He approached the common sailors and non-commissioned officers

on the
Schleswig-Holstein
in an imperious and personally insulting manner,

so much so that on two occasions his behaviour nearly led to a mutiny.95

But, despite these setbacks, Heydrich’s confidence grew and he felt that he

had ‘finally settled into’ his career as a navy officer.96 During and after his

service aboard the
Schleswig-Holstein
he used his more generously allotted

leisure time for sporting activities, mainly for sailing, swimming and

fencing. According to his roommate Beucke, Heydrich exercised every

day, horse-riding and jogging through the woods at weekends:

He wanted to become a pentathlete. He did everything with astounding

energy while vastly overestimating his talents and skills . . . He was

already dreaming of Olympic laurels and was never ashamed to praise

his achievements to the high heavens. When he wasn’t invited to the

Reichswehr Sport Championships, he felt completely misjudged. Based

on the results achieved at the Championships, he ‘proved’ to me that he

would have won the pentathlon . . .97

In Heydrich’s case, sporting prowess and military bearing were propel ed

by a desire to gain acceptance by his peers, but he was not alone in his

enthusiasm for sport as an expression of youthful virility. By 1931 over

6.5 mil ion Germans were members of organized sport associations. The

most popular sports for spectators were martial arts of various kinds, as

wel as sports involving speed, including modern piloting, which with its

daring manoeuvres was associated with adventure, heroic bravery and

technical progress. In the popular imagination the heroic pilot, embodied

YO U N G R E I N H A R D

39

by wartime figures such as the Red Baron, stood for the mastery by man

of the chal enges of modern technology. Heydrich himself began to take

flying lessons in the 1930s before participating as a pilot in various air raids

on the Norwegian and Russian front during the Second World War.98

After undergoing specialist training in radio operation and wireless

telegraphy, Heydrich continued to serve on the
Schleswig-Holstein
as radio

officer until October 1928.99 In 1950, his training officer at the naval

communications school, Gustav Kleikamp, recalled that Heydrich’s

‘talents, knowledge and ability were above average’. Kleikamp also stated

that Heydrich ‘was always convinced of his own abilities, ambitious and

able to present his achievements to his superiors in a favourable light’ – a

‘talent’ that he would use to his best advantage in later years.100 His

ambition grew with every success. According to his roommate at the

time, Heydrich tried ‘to “shine” everywhere: at work, towards his

superiors, towards his comrades, towards the crew, in sport, in society and

at the bar. He collected a repertoire of jokes and anecdotes, and accompa-

nied his songs on a lute. And he frequently impressed people in this

way . . .’101

On 1 July 1928 Heydrich was promoted to first lieutenant and deployed

to the communications division of the Baltic Naval Station in Kiel. He

now had significantly more free time, which he largely devoted to sport,

music and a third area of interest: women. He had already displayed a

strong interest in girls during the
Schleswig-Holstein
’s summer voyage to

Spain and Portugal, and according to some of his former fellow officers he

lived out his sexual fantasies in bars and brothels.102 Back in Kiel, he

repeatedly sought the company of women whom he could impress with

his officer’s uniform, his good manners and his musical talents. His efforts

were not without success, as one of his fellow officers recalled after the

war: ‘He left an impression more than once, particularly on older ladies.’103

In 1930 he made the acquaintance of a schoolgirl from Berlin whom he

visited in the capital over a period of several months. This relationship was

to have immense personal consequences for Heydrich.104

Lina von Osten

Reinhard Heydrich met his future wife, Lina von Osten, at a ball in Kiel

on 6 December 1930. Born on the island of Fehmarn in Eastern Holstein,

Lina had grown up in the coastal village of Lütjenbrode where her father,

Jürgen von Osten, ran the local school. The Osten family was descended

from Danish nobility, but had undergone a steady social decline since the

German–Danish War of 1864, when Fehmarn fell to Prussia. As the

second son in a family with six boys and two girls, Jürgen von Osten had

40

HITLER’S HANGMAN

to give up all claims to the family farm and, in 1896, he moved to

the island of Fehmarn, where he met and married one of his pupils:

Lina’s mother, Mathilde Hiss, whose family had lived and worked as

merchants on the island for generations. Like the Ostens, the Hisses

had seen better times. The war and the subsequent inflation extinguished

whatever was left of the family fortunes and the Ostens were forced to

live in the red-brick school building where Lina’s father taught the local

children.105

After a childhood marked by material deprivation and uncertainty

about the future, Lina received her school-leaving certificate in Oldenburg

in 1927, before spending a year in her parents’ household, during which

time her mother instructed her in cooking and other domestic duties. But

Lina was more ambitious and defied social conventions. On her own

initiative, she applied for a position at the Kiel Vocational School for Girls

with the goal of becoming a teacher – a profession which, at least in

Germany, was still largely dominated by men. In 1928 she moved to Kiel

where she lived in a girls’ dormitory, the Henriettenhaus, frequently

attending social gatherings and balls like the one in December 1930

where she first met Reinhard Heydrich.106

Heydrich took an instant liking to the self-confident and pretty

nineteen-year-old blonde. The attraction was mutual and Heydrich spent

the rest of the evening in Lina’s company before offering to escort her

back to her living quarters when the ball had ended. While they were

walking through the night, he asked for permission to see her again and

she agreed to a stroll in the local park two days later. According to her

memoirs, Lina felt instant ‘sympathy’ for the ‘ambitious yet reserved man’,

who, as she testified many years later, was ‘a comrade, a friend – and really

much more’.107

Three days after their first date, Reinhard invited Lina to the theatre and

afterwards to a nearby wine bar. Although they hardly knew each other,

Heydrich ended the evening with a marriage proposal. Lina voiced a series

of objections – her parents had no idea of his existence and she had not

even finished school yet – but eventually she accepted. On 18 December,

Lina and Heydrich became secretly engaged, with Reinhard assuring his

fiancée that he would seek her family’s approval by Christmas.108

That same day, a seriously love-struck Reinhard Heydrich wrote her a

letter:

My dearest, dearest Lina! In the midst of the hustle and bustle of work

and in a great hurry before my departure, I wanted you to know that . . .

al my thoughts are with you. And I realize now how much I love you.

You! I can no longer remember what it was like before. But I know only

YO U N G R E I N H A R D

41

too wel what I leave behind. That is why I am looking forward al the

more to the life that lies ahead of us. You! With you I could endure every

sorrow! Only a few more days until Christmas Eve. The closer it comes,

the more confidently I look ahead. For being straightforward and upright

is the key demand I have always placed upon myself. It wil thus not be

difficult for me to look your father in the eye. You know, for me there is

nothing worse in people whom I love than beating around the bush and

insincerity. I don’t hesitate to confront mean guys with the same weapons.

– I can hardly wait until Saturday! Until then, much love, Your Reinhard.109

That weekend, Heydrich offically wrote to Lina’s father, Jürgen von

Osten, in order to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Then, over the

Christmas holidays, Heydrich visited his fianceé’s family in Lütjenbrode.

The visit confirmed much of what Lina had already told Reinhard: the

Ostens were part of northern Germany’s impoverished lower aristocracy,

a family that had lost all their savings in the post-war inflation. Since then,

the family had compensated for lost prestige and wealth by moving, like

many other German aristocratic familes that had fallen on hard times, to

the extreme right of the political spectrum. Lina’s brother, Hans, was an

early member of the Nazi Party, having joined in April 1929 after one of

Hitler’s first appearances in northern Germany. At the time of Reinhard’s

first visit to Lütjenbrode, Hans had been a party and SA member for

nearly three years.110

Lina, too, was already a convinced Nazi and a vehement anti-Semite

when she met Reinhard Heydrich in 1930. She first attended a Nazi party

rally in 1929 and was particularly impressed with the handsome young SS

men in their black uniforms who guarded the stage on which Hitler was

speaking that day. Reinhard may have reminded her of those imposing

men on the day of their first encounter, as she described him as ‘tall, manly

and very self-assured in his uniform’.111 According to her own post-war

testimony, however, Heydrich lacked any interest in political parties at the

time of their first encounter. Worse still from her point of view, he had

never heard of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
and frequently made jokes about the

leader of the Nazi Party as a ‘Bohemian corporal’ and the ‘cripple’

Goebbels.112 Lina, by contrast, found Hitler’s anti-Semitism particularly

appealing. Even in the 1970s, when most people in Germany tried to

disguise their former anti-Semitism, Lina openly confessed that as a teen-

ager she had regarded the Polish Jews who had come into the country

after 1918 as ‘intruders and unwelcome guests’, and had felt so ‘provoked’

by their mere presence that she just ‘had to hate them’: ‘We compared

living with them to a forced marriage, where the partners literally cannot

bear the smell of one another.’113

42

HITLER’S HANGMAN

It was through Lina and her family that Heydrich had his first proper

introduction to Nazism, an ideology born in the immediate post-war

atmosphere of national trauma, defeat, revolution and inflation. Most of

the elements that went into its eclectic ideology – anti-Semitism, Social

Darwinism and a firm belief in a strong authoritarian leadership – had

already existed in Germany and many other European societies before

1914. Germany’s decent into a political and economic abyss between 1914

and 1923 gave such extreme views a new urgency, and increased the will-

ingness to use violence and murder to implement the measures which

pan-Germans, anti-Semites, eugenicists and ultra-nationalists had been

advocating since before the turn of the century.114 The apparent divisive-

ness of Weimar politics, so Hitler’s followers believed, required a firm

leadership to reunite the nation in a new people’s community, the

Volksgemeinschaft
. The institutions of state, society and culture would be

remodelled to create a racially homogeneous nation imbued with one

purpose: to make Germany great again. All those who stood in its way

would be crushed. ‘Community aliens’ and above all Jews would be forced

out of society. Weak, feeble or ‘degenerate’ elements would also be elimi-

nated from the chain of heredity. Thus strengthened, the German nation

would launch a war of conquest in Eastern Europe that would transform

Germany into a superpower and overcome the humiliations of the

previous decades.115

Such ideas remained those of a small number of Germans until 1929,

when the onset of the Great Depression catapulted Hitler’s previously tiny

party of extremists into the centre of German politics, even though it

never won an overall majority in general elections. By the time Reinhard