Hitler's Hangman (16 page)

refused to become ‘a sailing domestic for rich kids’.133 It is not known why

he did not jump at this opportunity, but the decisive reason appears to be

that he was unable to accept the loss of his social status as an officer, as he

confessed to his fiancée.134

In these circumstances, Reinhard’s mother seized the initiative and told

Heydrich’s godmother, Elise Baroness von Eberstein, of her son’s profes-

sional misfortunes. A formidable lady in her early sixties, the Baronness

and her husband, Major von Eberstein, had met the Heydrichs at a

concert in Hal e shortly after their arrival in the city and they became their

closest family friends, supporting the activities of the Conservatory

through significant donations.135 The Baronness immediately contacted

her son, Karl, who had joined the Nazi Party in the mid-1920s and had

already acquired a senior position as leader of the
Sturmabteilung
(Storm

Troopers, SA) in Munich, in order to see if he knew of any suitable vacan-

cies. Karl’s response was cautiously optimistic.136 Under the capable

leadership of Ernst Röhm, and benefiting from the rising number of

unemployed men in Germany, the SA had grown from just over 60,000

members in 1930 to more than 150,000 men the fol owing year. In

the civil war-like atmosphere of the early 1930s, when armed supporters

of the Nazis and their opponents clashed almost on a daily basis, former

officers like Heydrich, trained in military tactics, were a welcome addition

to the Nazis’ ranks. Yet while Heydrich’s mother and his fiancée were

excited by the prospect of a second career in uniform for Heydrich, he

himself appears to have had initial reservations, although Lina urged him

to examine this career option careful y.137 It was not until Eberstein

offered him the prospect of an ‘elevated position’ in the Nazi Party’s head-

quarters in Munich that Heydrich agreed to take this path. What

Eberstein had in mind was a position on the staff of Heinrich Himmler,

the then stil largely unknown head of the
Schutzstaffel
(Protection Squad,

SS), a tiny but elitist paramilitary formation subordinate to the SA leader-

ship of Ernst Röhm.138

Partly as a result of circumstances beyond his control – the military

court’s harsh decision to dismiss him from the navy, his family’s economic

misfortunes and the Great Depression more generally – and partly

because of his family connections and Lina’s firm commitment to the

Nazi cause, the previously largely apolitical Heydrich, who had never read

Mein Kampf
or even heard of the SS before, was about to enter the most

extreme paramilitary formation within Hitler’s movement. He followed

that path not out of deep ideological conviction, but because Nazism

offered him the opportunity to return to a structured life in uniform,

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

providing along with it a sense of purpose and a way of regaining the

confidence of Lina and her family of devoted Nazis.

As a precondition for the new job, Heydrich had to join the Nazi Party,

which he did on 1 June 1931. His membership number, 544,916, did not

exactly make him an ‘Old Fighter’ of the Nazi movement, but he joined

early enough to avoid the suspicion of careerism with which post-1933

members were usually confronted. Heydrich urgently requested the two

letters of recommendation required for the vacancy. The first reference

came from Eberstein, who assured Himmler of Heydrich’s suitability:

‘Very good qualifications, extended overseas commands . . . Heydrich has

been dismissed from the navy due to minor personal differences. He will

receive his salary for two more years, so, for the time being, he could work

for the movement without pay.’ Either out of ignorance or to boost

Heydrich’s chances of securing the job, Eberstein added that Heydrich

had worked for ‘three years as an intelligence expert at the Admiral’s Staff

Division of the North Sea and Baltic station’.139 A second letter of recom-

mendation was submitted by Heydrich’s former commanding officer,

Captain Warzecha:

I have known the naval lieutenant Heydrich from the beginning of

his service with the Reichsmarine. I was his training officer for two

years during his cadet period and have had other opportunities to observe

his development as an officer. I am closely acquainted with the reasons

for his dismissal from the Navy. They do not prevent me from whole-

heartedly recommending Lieutenant Heydrich for any position that

may arise.140

Heydrich’s application, enhanced by Eberstein’s insistence that his

childhood friend was an expert in espionage, arrived at a good time as

Himmler was in the midst of setting up an SS intelligence service. In

the summer of 1931, prompted by the Nazi Party’s electoral successes

and a parallel influx of new members of often questionable loyalty to

the cause, Himmler felt an urgent need for the creation of such a service.

He rightly feared that some of the new SA and SS members stood in

the paid service of either the police or political opponents to act as

spies or agents provocateurs. He realized that he needed a suitably

trained officer on his Munich staff to address this problem. Having

heard from Eberstein of an ex-naval ‘intelligence’ officer who was

offering his services to the Nazi movement, he invited Heydrich for an

interview.141

Heydrich’s appointment with Himmler had already been set when

Eberstein telegraphed Heydrich from Munich to tell him that the SS

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

49

chief was ill. Heydrich was prepared to reschedule the appointment, but

Lina urged him to travel to Munich and meet with Himmler anyway.

How much this opportunity meant to Lina is clear from her memoirs, in

which, thirty-five years later, she described the day of the first meeting

between Heydrich and Himmler, 14 June 1931, as the ‘greatest moment

of my life, of our life’.142

C H A P T ER I I I

✦

Becoming Heydrich

A Second Chance

On 14 June 1931, shortly before noon, Heydrich arrived at

Munich Central Station. His childhood friend, Karl von Eberstein, met

him at the station and drove him to Himmler’s poultry farm in the Munich

suburb of Waldtrudering, where the Reich Leader SS was recovering from

the flu.1 The meeting was to prove a momentous one, the beginning of an

eleven-year relationship of close collaboration and mutual respect. Much

has been written since the Second World War about the alleged rivalry

between the two men and Heydrich’s apparent later attempts to sideline

Himmler in pursuit of total power.2 But the post-war testimonies of

former SS officers on which this interpretation was based are generally

unreliable and too narrowly focused on the apparent differences between

the ideologically driven ‘school master’ Himmler, whose physical appear-

ance stood in stark contrast to his own vision for the SS, and the coldly

rational and supposedly only career-driven Heydrich on the other. The key

witness to the myth of rivalry between the two men, Himmler’s masseur

Felix Kersten, alleged that next to the often indecisive and insecure Reich

Leader SS, Heydrich left the impression of being made of ‘sharpened steel’.

According to Kersten, only the ‘fact’ of Heydrich’s Jewish ancestry allowed

Himmler to keep his first lieutenant under control.3

In reality, their relationship was one of deep trust, complementary

talents and shared political convictions. Himmler, who was only four years

older than Heydrich, also came from an educated middle-class family, his

father being the director of one of Bavaria’s finest secondary schools, the

Wittelsbach Gymnasium. He had been called up for military service in

1917 and experienced the German collapse the following year as an officer

cadet in the army barracks at Regensburg. Himmler’s political awakening

occurred notably earlier than Heydrich’s: politicized by the war and its

B E C O M I N G H E Y D R I C H

51

inglorious end, he joined Freikorps to oppose the short-lived Munich

Council Republic in 1919 while simultaneously studying for his
Abitur

school-leaving certificate, which he obtained that same year. Between

1919 and 1922, he studied at Munich’s Technical University, earning a

diploma in agriculture. He worked for a year at a factory in Schleissheim

producing fertilizer from dung but was increasingly obsessed by politics.

Through old Freikorps contacts and his subsequent involvement in two

radical
völkisch
and anti-Semitic societies, the Artamanen League and the

Thule Society, Himmler became aware of the emerging Nazi Party, which

he joined in August 1923 and in whose ranks he participated in the

unsuccessful putsch in Munich that Hitler launched in November that

year. In the summer of 1924, while Hitler’s party was banned, Himmler

became secretary to Gregor Strasser – then the second most powerful man

in the Nazi Party and the leading proponent of the party’s National-

Bolshevik wing. While acting as Strasser’s propaganda chief, he travelled

by motorcycle all over Bavaria. His marriage in July 1928 to the nurse

Margarete Boden, seven years older than him, enabled him to purchase a

poultry smallholding in Waltrudering after Margarete had sold her share

in a nursing home in Berlin.4

Since assuming the leadership of the (then still tiny) SS in 1929,

Himmler’s desire to transform it into an organization for the racial elite

had been reflected in his introduction of physical selection criteria for his

men. He envisaged the ‘Aryan’ body as the perfection of an ideal state of

mankind that distinguished itself from ill and ‘inferior’ bodies. He desired

tall, blue-eyed men who could show family trees free of ‘inferior racial

origin’: the body was the place where one’s membership of the Aryan race

could be ‘verified’. Unsurprisingly, Himmler was very impressed by the

young applicant who presented himself on the afternoon of 14 June 1931.

Blond, blue-eyed and just over six foot tall, Heydrich even surpassed the

strict recruitment criteria for Hitler’s SS bodyguard, the elite ‘Leibstandarte

Adolf Hitler’.5

Himmler told Heydrich about his plans to develop an intelligence

service within the SS. It was only at this point that they realized that

their meeting was based on a misunderstanding: Heydrich had been a

radio officer in the navy, not an intelligence officer.6 Undeterred by the

realization that the applicant in front of him lacked any previous qualifica-

tion for espionage work, Himmler asked Heydrich to sketch out an

organizational plan for an SS intelligence agency and gave him twenty

minutes to complete the task. Without any previous experience in the

field of espionage, Heydrich resorted to the minimal knowledge he had

gained from years of reading cheap crime fiction and spy novels, and

wrapped his suggestions for a future SS intelligence service in suitably

52

HITLER’S HANGMAN

military phraseology. His minimal knowledge of espionage appears to have

surpassed that of Himmler: the Reich Leader SS was impressed and hired

him in preference to a second applicant, a former police captain named

Horninger. Himmler’s instincts served him well. Horninger turned out to

be an agent of the Bavarian Political Police and was arrested after the

Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, later committing suicide in prison.7

Heydrich’s salary started at a modest 180 Reichsmarks per month –

more than Eberstein had suggested to Himmler in his reference but

significantly less than, for example, a skilled labourer in the chemical

industry (228 RM per month), a civil service trainee (244 RM) or even an

unskilled retail employee (228 RM) could expect to earn in 1931.8 The

fact that Heydrich chose this position in the SS instead of any of the

better-paid jobs that were on offer was due to a number of factors: his

desire to impress his wife and her family with a job in the political move-

ment they supported, the position’s quasi-military nature and the appeal

of a challenging new task in a revolutionary institution that rejected

the very political system which, from Heydrich’s point of view, had just

terminated his seemingly secure naval career.9

For the rest of Heydrich’s life, Himmler was his central ideological and

professional reference point, more so perhaps even than Hitler. Throughout

his career in the SS, Heydrich remained conscious of the debt he owed to

the Reich Leader SS and Himmler could rely on his unshakeable loyalty.