Hitler's Hangman (18 page)

Heydrich was to use similar arguments to justify an extension of SS

powers: by suggesting that the national community was surrounded and

penetrated by internal enemies successfully camouflaged as Nazi loyalists,

he made a convincing case for an extraordinary strike force capable of

uncovering and eliminating the enemies within the Nazi movement.23

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

57

Heydrich’s suggestions were promptly implemented: an order from

Himmler on 4 September 1931 called for the development of a network

of agents for intelligence-gathering purposes. A passage contained in

the order stating that the group would restrict its activities to non-

governmental organizations was mere camouflage in case the Bavarian

police caught wind of the plan.24

During his first months in Munich, Heydrich lived alone as a lodger in

the home of an elderly widow, Viktoria Edrich, a long-standing supporter

of the Nazi Party, at Türkenstrasse 23 in the bohemian district of

Schwabing, where Edrich rented out rooms to unmarried SS men. In

December 1931, Heydrich moved his intel igence service with three newly

appointed staff members to this flat in order to protect its work from

potential spies in the Brown House.25 Over the fol owing weeks and

months, Heydrich endeavoured to instal SD liaison officers in each of the

individual SS regiments across Germany with orders to gather information

on political enemies and report this information back to Munich. Around

fifty such liaison officers were in post by the end of December 1931.26

Much to Heydrich’s dismay, the swift progress of his work did not go

unnoticed. In November 1931, the newspaper
Münchner Post
published an

insightful article that blew Heydrich’s efforts to keep his organization

secret: the article reported on a new SS intelligence service slated to

become ‘a fascist Cheka’ – a German equivalent to the notorious

Soviet state security organization founded by Lenin in 1917 – if Hitler

ever ascended to power. Even more damaging for him, the paper uncov-

ered what it believed to be the ‘real brains behind the organization: an

ex-naval officer with the name of Reinhard Heydrich’. The
Post
clearly

overestimated Heydrich’s importance at the time, but the article convinced

him that he was surrounded by spies and that he had to be more distrustful

of his colleagues in the future.27

By the end of 1931, Heydrich had consolidated his professional future

and personal finances to such an extent that he could finally marry his

fiancée. On Boxing Day, the birthday of his father-in-law, Reinhard

Heydrich married Lina von Osten in the Protestant church of St

Catherine’s in Grossenbrode on the Baltic coast. Lina’s post-war descrip-

tion of her wedding day illustrates how strongly connected she already was

in Nazi circles and how the couple made use of this formal occasion to

demonstrate their political convictions:

My bridegroom was still practically unknown back then, but I was

already someone in the Party. My brother was also known as one of the

first hundred thousand followers of Hitler . . . The SA and SS had just

been banned temporarily. But the police could not easily intervene in the

58

HITLER’S HANGMAN

cemetery that surrounded the church. The SA and SS, dressed in white

shirts and black trousers, formed a guard of honour all the way to the

cemetery gate. The pastor was also on our side . . . [and] gave us a Luther

quotation as a wedding motto: ‘And though this world, with devils filled,

should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God hath willed His

truth to triumph through us.’ As we marched out of the church, the

organist played the Horst Wessel Song. As we left the cemetery

following the wedding several guards of honour were arrested by the

police.28

To mark the happy occasion, Himmler promoted Heydrich to

SS-
Sturmbannführer
(major) – just seven days after his promotion to SS

Hauptsturmführer
(captain). In a little over fifteen months in the SS

Heydrich had thus already outstripped his former military rank in the navy.

Even if being a naval officer remained more prestigious than an SS career

at this point, Heydrich must have felt that his life was back on track.

Himmler also authorized the promised pay rise to 290 Reichsmarks, which

meant that (including the severance payment which Heydrich continued

to receive from the navy for a few more months) the Heydrich family had

a total income of 490 Reichsmarks per month – not exactly a fortune, but

a comfortable salary.29

Himmler’s generous gesture was, at least in part, designed to encourage

other SS leaders to follow Heydrich’s example and to start a family with a

racially suitable woman. Less than a week after Heydrich’s wedding, on

31 December, Himmler issued his famous ‘marriage order’ in an attempt

to transform the SS from an exclusively male corps into a community

of carefully selected families, the SS-
Sippengemeinschaft
. Unmarried

SS men – including those suspected of homosexual tendencies – were

summoned to marry, but before doing so they had to apply for Himmler’s

approval of their chosen brides. This approval depended on a racial

suitability test conducted by the SS Racial Office (the later Race and

Settlement Office or RuSHA). The prospective bride and groom were

both medically examined and tested for genetic disorders and fertility

problems. Furthermore, they had to complete questionnaires on their

family’s medical history. A special form, the so-called
Rassekarte
, was used

to register the racial qualities of each SS man and his future bride. Reports

were then submitted to Himmler as to whether or not their mutual repro-

duction was ‘racially desirable’.30

The meaning and purpose of Himmler’s obsession with racial selection

and breeding, which was the subject of much ridicule and criticism

outside the SS, was to develop the organization as a racially superior

community of husbands, wives and children. SS wives would not only

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

59

ensure a stable domestic framework in which their warrior husbands

could gather new energy for their militant tasks, but they would also – and

more importantly – serve as the ‘preservers of the species’ on the battlefield

of the ‘birth war’, thus taking a place of equal importance to their

husbands within the racial community.31 At the heart of Himmler’s racial

ideology stood a vulgarized Darwinian notion of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’

selection. The SS family was central to the realization of his fantasy of

creating a new racial aristocracy within the ‘Germanic–Nordic race’, an

‘aristocracy of blood and soil’ that Himmler’s intellectual mentor, Walther

Darré, had described in a 1930 book of the same title.32

SS ideologues such as Darré and Himmler placed the Nordic peoples

– tall, blond and blue-eyed – at the apex of the racial hierarchy in which

they saw humanity ordered. Himmler had by no means invented this

notion himself: the idea of a pure and superior Nordic race born to rule

the world had been widespread in Germany and other European countries

for decades. From the turn of the century, racial hygienists had been

discussing the possibility of using racial selection to reach a higher level of

human development. Basing their ideas on Darwin’s theories and the

subsequent publications of his cousin, Francis Galton, racial hygienists

believed that they could use the selection principle to explain human

history as a story of progress. For them, the key element of Darwin’s

evolution theory was the struggle for survival, in which only the fittest

asserted themselves and survived. However, the effectiveness of the

natural selection process had been so undermined by ‘modern civilization’

over the years that the ‘unfit’ were also allowed to survive, thereby passing

on their flawed genetic material and potentially weakening their race as a

whole. The Nazis believed that they could correct this ‘degeneration’ by a

process of artificial selection. The reproduction of the ‘unfit’ should be

prevented and that of the ‘fit’ promoted.33

Himmler’s concept of racial selection, which in the ensuing years also

formed the basis of Heydrich’s convictions, was thus based, on the one

hand, on traditions of positivism, and notably on the assumption that all

processes in nature are scientifically explainable, and, on the other hand,

on a vulgarized form of Social Darwinism that had been propagated in

most Western European countries since the late nineteenth century. In

terms of racial selection, the Heydrichs must have appeared as a perfect

example of healthy ‘Nordic qualities’ – a ‘beautiful couple’, as Hitler

remarked when he was first introduced to Lina by her husband.34

After the wedding, Lina accompanied Reinhard back to Munich where

they rented a small house in the suburb of Lochhausen. Although the

Heydrichs spent only eight months in Lochhausen, Lina immediately

started to furnish the house out of her dowry and to acquaint herself with

60

HITLER’S HANGMAN

the customs of her new neighbourhood. Reinhard Heydrich joined the

local football club, if only as a passive member.35 In an ecstatic letter of

6 January 1932, he thanked his parents-in-law for hosting the wedding

and described the couple’s new life in Lochhausen: ‘Our beautiful, spick-

and-span house has now become a proper home. Out here, far from the

turmoil of the big city, we find rest and relaxation after our daily work.

Lina reigns supreme over her kingdom. Some visitor or another appears

nearly every day.’36 But Lina had greater difficulty in adjusting to the

unfamiliar Bavarian lifestyle and her role in the SS-
Sippengemeinschaft

than Heydrich was willing to admit. She took a particular dislike to

Margarete Himmler, whom she frequently met in Munich. Lina would

later describe her as a ‘pedestrian, humourless’ woman, whose stinginess

was reflected in the cheap furnishings in the Himmler home. Lina also

felt lonely in the unfamiliar new environment where her daily life was

largely spent without her husband. Reinhard, whose work demanded most

of his time, was rarely at home.37

The need for reforms to Heydrich’s still highly amateurish spy network

in Germany became apparent in February 1932, when the SD suddenly

found itself in a crisis prompted by the arrest of one of Heydrich’s agents

who had tried to gather secret military information from the navy

command in Wilhelmshaven. Although the police investigation did not

reveal Heydrich’s involvement in the case, he nevertheless recognized the

need to restructure his intelligence service in order to avoid further

embarrassment.38 A ban on the SA and the SS in April 1932 offered an

unintended opportunity to do so. After a wave of violent SA street terror

against political opponents, Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning officially

banned the Nazis’ paramilitary organizations, although the ban was subse-

quently lifted by his successor, Franz von Papen, just a few weeks later.

During this brief period of illegality, Heydrich’s department disguised

itself by assuming the innocuous title of Press and Information Service

(PID) while simultaneously undergoing a structural reform. Heydrich

intended to make his organization less dependent on the goodwill of

informers from the individual SS divisions, as well as protecting it from

future interference from other party agencies. For this purpose, he under-

took a number of inspection tours throughout Germany, during which he

succeeded in hiring full-time staff who would now be solely responsible to

(and supervised by) his office in Munich.39

After the ban had been lifted in June 1932, Heydrich’s SD emerged

strengthened. It also asserted itself against the internal competition from

the SA’s own intel igence service under the direction of Count Du Moulin

Eckart, which ceased to exist that month.40 At the same time, Heydrich was

promoted to the rank of SS-
Standartenführer
, or colonel. The Heydrichs

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61

could now afford to move into a smal city vil a near the Nymphenburg

Palace, which also served as the new SD headquarters with a total of eight

ful -time employees.41 Lina spent little time there. During the campaign for

the Reichstag elections of 31 July 1932, daily street battles raged between

Communists and Nazis throughout Germany, kil ing over 100 people and