Hitler's Hangman (19 page)

injuring more than 4,500. Reinhard feared for the wel being of his wife and

sent her to a smal pension in the Bavarian countryside where she stayed for

several weeks.42

Heydrich’s rapid rise in the SS hierarchy and his scarcely disguised

ambition earned him many enemies. At the beginning of June 1932, the

old rumour of his Jewish ancestry came back to haunt him once again, this

time amplified in its damaging potential by the fact that he was now

working for a political organization in which anti-Semitism was a funda-

mental tenet of faith. It is likely that local members of the Nazi Party in

Halle, jealous of Heydrich’s swift ascent, had alerted the regional party

leadership to the rumours. On 6 June, the Nazi Gauleiter of Halle-

Magdeburg, Rudolf Jordan, wrote to the Nazi Party’s organizational

leader, Gregor Strasser, enquiring about ‘a party member with the name of

Heydrich whose father lives in Halle. There is reason to assume that his

father, Bruno Heydrich, is a Jew.’ As ‘proof ’, Jordan enclosed the extract

from the 1916 edition of Hugo Riemann’s music encyclopaedia in which

Bruno Heydrich was referred to as ‘Heydrich (actually Süss)’. Jordan

insisted that the party’s personnel department investigate the matter.43

Around the same time, Heydrich’s former fellow officer and member of

the court of honour, Hubertus von Wangenheim, told a relative who was

working in the Brown House about the rumours that had accompanied

Heydrich’s time in the navy. He mentioned that Heydrich had been teased

by his fellow officer cadets as a ‘white Jew’ and ‘white Moses’. Such

rumours fuelled suspicions at Nazi Party headquarters.44 Strasser imme-

diately passed the matter on to the party’s chief genealogist, Dr Achim

Gercke, head of the Nazis’
Auskunft
, or Information Office. Scarcely two

weeks later, on 22 June, Gercke responded with a detailed report on

Heydrich’s ancestry and confirmed that he was ‘of German origin and free

from any influence of coloured or Jewish blood’. Gercke insisted that the

‘insulting rumour’ of non-Aryan ancestry was entirely unfounded: ‘I take

full responsibility for the accuracy of this opinion and declare myself

prepared to testify to it before a court should the need arise.’45

Despite this clarification, Heydrich was deeply shaken by the re-

emergence of the damaging rumours only a year after his dismissal from

the navy, rumours that threatened his carefully rebuilt professional exist-

ence. Instead of accepting the findings of Gercke with relief, he privately

engaged a member of his SD service, Ernst Hoffman, to undertake further

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

genealogical investigations. After the war, Hoffman recalled Heydrich’s

nervousness at each of their meetings, a nervousness which seemed

‘understandable but without foundation’.46 It was not the last time that

Heydrich had to engage with the dreaded rumour: in 1940 a baker from

Halle, Johannes Papst, himself a member of the Nazi Party, was sentenced

to twelve months’ imprisonment for spreading the libellous gossip that

Heydrich was a Jew.47

Partly as a result of this embarrassing and potential y career-terminating

episode, Heydrich devoted great energy to his work in the summer of

1932. His ambitions continued to be vast. In September, during the first

meeting with the recently instal ed branch office directors of the SD, he

declared that he intended to develop the organization into the German

equivalent of the British secret service (as he understood it): ‘Its task would

be to gather, evaluate and verify substantive material on the objectives,

methods and plans of internal enemies; and to report on potential wrongdo-

ings within our own ranks.’48 Compared to the reality of the situation in

mid-1932, these were fantastical goals. The SD was stil a tiny outfit with

no more than thirty-three ful -time employees and a thinly spread network

of largely unpaid agents scarcely able to fulfil the tasks already assigned

to them.49

The autumn of 1932 brought Heydrich further uncertainties. In the

November Reichstag elections Hitler’s party lost more than 2 mil ion

votes, triggering an over-optimistic media campaign by the republican left

predicting the imminent death of Nazism. If only briefly, Heydrich must

have wondered whether he had made the right decision in joining the Nazi

Party. The SD’s finances, always dependent on irregular payments from the

party and the SA, further deteriorated in late 1932 to the extent that for a

few weeks around Christmas even Heydrich’s telephone was cut off due to

unpaid bil s. In January 1933, immediately prior to the seizure of power,

the Nazi Party temporarily stopped paying the SD employees altogether.

The bleak winter of 1932 clearly marked the low point of Heydrich’s SS

career and few people would have predicted at that time that either the SD

or Heydrich had any future role to play in German politics.50

Seizures of Power

The events of January 1933 amounted to an extraordinary political drama,

a drama that unfolded silently behind closed doors and largely out of

Heydrich’s sight. Backed by senior figures in the German business

community and by the powerful Agrarian League of largely East Elbian

estate holders, Germany’s former conservative Chancellor, Franz von

Papen, was looking for ways to replace his increasingly unpopular and

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

63

isolated successor in office, General Kurt von Schleicher, with a right-

wing coalition government that enjoyed broad popular support. The only

way of establishing a viable government of the national right, as was clear

to everyone involved, was to bring the strongest political party in Germany,

the Nazi Party, into the cabinet. The question was whether the key players

– Hitler, Papen and Reich President von Hindenburg – could agree on the

price for Nazi participation in government. Although Papen initially

wanted the chancellor’s seat for himself, frenetic negotiations between

Hitler, Papen and close associates of Hindenburg finally led to a compro-

mise: Hitler was to lead the government as chancellor, but he was to be

firmly contained by a majority of ‘reliable’ conservative ministers who

enjoyed Hindenburg’s confidence.51

Deprived of Hindenburg’s crucial support, Chancellor von Schleicher

resigned on 27 January 1933. That very same day, Heydrich was ordered

by Himmler to relocate to Berlin, where he moved into a house in the

salubrious Westend that served both as his private residence and as the

SD headquarters in the German capital. Against the backdrop of ongoing

negotiations between Hitler, Papen and Hindenburg regarding a future

Nazi-led coalition government, Heydrich’s task was twofold: to prepare

the relocation of the SD from Munich to Berlin for the increasingly likely

event of a Nazi takeover and to establish closer ties with the powerful and

largely independent SS division in the capital. Just three days after

Heydrich’s arrival in Berlin, on 30 January, Himmler informed him that

Hitler had been appointed German chancellor as head of a coalition

government.52

Heydrich played a passive role in the largely uncoordinated events that

now unfolded throughout Germany. In the lead-up to the general elec-

tions of 5 March which Hitler hoped would strengthen the electoral basis

of his new government, the Nazis gradually increased the pressure on their

opponents on the political left, starting with the Decree for the Protection

of the German People of 4 February, which provided a means of banning

opposition newspapers during the election campaign. A welcome pretext

for the escalation of physical violence against Communists and Social

Democrats occurred on 27 February when a lone Dutchman with a

Communist past, Marinus van der Lubbe, set fire to the Reichstag

building in Berlin. The Nazi leadership immediately seized upon the event

as a long-awaited opportunity to wage open war on the German

Communist Party.53 Five days earlier, to deal with an alleged increase in

left-radical violence, the new Prussian Minister President, Hermann

Göring, had recruited some 50,000 men from the ranks of the SA and the

SS as ‘auxiliary policemen’ with authority to carry out arrests. Now the

often threatened day of reckoning had arrived. The Nazi auxiliary

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

policemen swiftly used their newly gained powers to incarcerate thou-

sands of real or alleged political enemies and to hold them, without

judicial sanction, in abandoned factories, warehouses and basements

where they were subjected to orgies of cruelty. Communists in particular

were savagely repressed. Individuals were brutally beaten and tortured,

sometimes even murdered, with total impunity. By April, the number of

political prisoners arrested in Prussia alone exceeded 25,000.54

Physical coercion was directed with massive ferocity against leading

Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists, and with symbolic or

exemplary force against those such as liberals, Catholics and conservatives

who were less diametrically opposed to the politics of the emerging Third

Reich. Jews were often maltreated, but they were not the primary target

of Nazi violence. By the end of the summer of 1933, some 100,000 people,

mainly opponents on the political left, had been arrested throughout

Germany, with some 500–600 killed.55

Although the Nazi ‘revolution’ of 1933 claimed relatively few lives – at

least in comparison with the extreme bloodshed of the following twelve

years – violence and intimidation were a central component. The wave of

arrests, deliberately carried out to create a climate of fear, led the victims

to police prisons or, worse, to one of the many ‘wild’ concentration camps

or informal torture cellars which sprang up across the country to deal with

putative enemies. Physical violence during the first weeks of the Third

Reich served a dual purpose: to eliminate the most outspoken opponents

of Nazism and to intimidate those who might pose a potential threat.

Nazi terror, real and threatened, had a devastating effect, but physical

violence was unevenly applied in different parts of Germany where the

local SA usually acted on its own initiative. In the first two months at least

of the Third Reich, the terror was not co-ordinated from above.56

During the first few weeks of the Third Reich Heydrich remained a

mere observer of political events and the terror that erupted on Germany’s

streets. If he and Himmler had hoped that the Nazi seizure of power

would propel them into positions of influence in Berlin, their ambitions

were quickly disappointed. Both were left empty-handed after the distri-

bution of key offices in the German capital. Heydrich himself remained

in Berlin until March 1933, but continued to operate on the sidelines of

the major political events that took place in Germany’s capital. Frustrated

that the new dawn of the Third Reich had not increased his personal

influence at all, he decided to launch a new initiative.

On 5 March, the day of the general elections which unsurprisingly – given

the pressures on the opposition – gave the Nazis 43.9 per cent of the popular

vote, Heydrich sought to make contact with Kurt Daluege, the powerful

leader of SS Division East and recently appointed commissioner for special

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65

assignments in the Prussian Interior Ministry, who would later become

Heydrich’s counterpart as head of the Third Reich’s uniformed Order Police.

Daluege, so much was clear to Heydrich, was an indispensable contact who

could open doors in the capital. Born in 1897 in ethnical y mixed Upper

Silesia, Daluege had a characteristic SS career: he had served both in the

Great War and in various Freikorps formations after 1918 and joined the

Nazi Party in 1922 before transferring from the SA to the SS in 1929,

becoming the leader of that organization for Berlin and northern Germany.

Since then, Daluege had played a key role in restraining the unruly East

German SA, whose members felt that Hitler’s legalistic route to power was

simply too slow. Partly for that reason, Göring had selected him as the future

strong man in the Prussian police apparatus and authorized him to under-

take a political purge of the police force.57

As Heydrich understood, being directly authorized by Göring and now

employed as a senior official in the Prussian Interior Ministry made

Daluege relatively independent of the SS leadership in Munich. Daluege,

who was busy climbing the career ladder, had little time for the unknown