Hitler's Hangman (4 page)

gence service – the SD – into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in

1939, Heydrich commanded a sizeable shadow army of Gestapo and SD

officers directly responsible for Nazi terror at home and in the occupied

territories. As such he was also in charge of the infamous SS mobile

killing squads, the
Einsatzgruppen
, during the campaigns against Austria,

Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union. Secondly, in September

1941, Heydrich was appointed by Hitler as acting Reich Protector of

Bohemia and Moravia, a position that made him the undisputed ruler of

the former Czech lands. The eight months of his rule in Prague and the

aftermath of his assassination are still remembered as the darkest time in

modern Czech history. Thirdly, in 1941 Heydrich was instructed by the

second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, Hermann Göring, to find

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INTRODUCTION

and implement a ‘total solution of the Jewish question’ in Europe, a solu-

tion which, by the summer of 1942, culminated in the indiscriminate and

systematic murder of the Jews of Europe. With these three positions,

Reinhard Heydrich undoubtedly played a central role in the complex

power system of the Third Reich.

Yet, despite his major share of responsibility for some of the worst

atrocities committed in the name of Nazi Germany and the continuing

interest of both historians and the general public in Hitler’s dictatorship,

Heydrich remains a remarkably neglected and oddly nebulous figure in

the extensive literature on the Third Reich. Although some 40,000 books

have been published on the history of Nazi Germany, including several

important studies on other high-ranking SS officers such as Heinrich

Himmler, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Adolf Eichmann and Werner Best, there

is no serious scholarly biography that spans the entire life of this key figure

within the Nazi terror apparatus.2 The only exception to this remarkable

neglect is Shlomo Aronson’s pioneering 1967 PhD thesis on Heydrich’s

role in the early history of the Gestapo and the SD, which unfortunately

ends in 1936 when the SS took full control of the German police. Written

in German and never translated into English, Aronson’s research has left

a mine of material on Heydrich’s early life that no later historian in the

field can ignore, but his study is not a biography and was never intended

to be one.3

Several journalists have attempted to fill the gap left by professional

historians. Although not without merit, particularly in gathering post-war

testimonies of Heydrich’s former SS associates and childhood friends,

these earlier Heydrich biographies reflect a by now largely obsolete under-

standing of Nazi leaders as either depraved criminals or perversely rational

desk-killers – an interpretation that built on the post-war testimonies of

Nazi victims and former SS men alike.4 The Swiss League of Nations’

High Commissioner in Danzig between 1937 and 1939, Carl Jacob

Burckhardt, who had met Heydrich in the summer of 1935 during an

inspection tour of Nazi concentration camps, famously described him in

his memoirs as the Third Reich’s ‘young evil god of death’.5 Post-war

recollections of former SS subordinates were similarly unflattering.

His deputy of many years, Dr Werner Best, characterized Heydrich as

the ‘most demonic personality in the Nazi leadership’, driven by an ‘inhu-

manity which took no account of those he mowed down’.6 Himmler’s

personal adjutant, Karl Wolff, described Heydrich as ‘devilish’, while

Walter Schellenberg, the youngest of the departmental heads in the Reich

Security Main Office, remembered his former boss as a ragingly ambitious

man with ‘an incredibly acute perception of the moral, human, profes-

sional and political weakness of others’. ‘His unusual intellect’, Schellenberg

I N T R O D U C T I O N

xv

insisted, ‘was matched by the ever-watchful instincts of a predatory

animal’, who ‘in a pack of ferocious wolves, must always prove himself the

strongest’.7

Such post-war testimonies of former SS officers must be approached

with caution. With Heydrich, Himmler and Hitler dead, and the Third

Reich in ruins, Best, Wolff, Schellenberg and other senior SS men in

Allied captivity were keen to whitewash their own responsibility and to

‘prove’ that they had merely followed orders from superiors who were

too powerful and scary to be disobeyed. Yet their characterizations of

Heydrich stuck in the popular imagination, fuelled by books such as

Charles Wighton’s 1962 biography,
Heydrich: Hitler’s Most Evil Henchman
.

Wighton perpetuated a powerful myth in explaining Heydrich’s murderous

zeal: the myth of his alleged Jewish family background which originated

in Heydrich’s early youth and, despite the best efforts of his family to

refute it, continued to resurface both during and after the Third Reich.

After 1945, it was cultivated by former SS officers such as Wilhelm Höttl,

who maintained in his autobiographical book
The Secret Front
(1950) that

Heydrich ordered his agents to remove the gravestone of his ‘Jewish

grandmother’.8 Others jumped on the potentially lucrative bandwagon of

‘exposing’ the chief organizer of the Holocaust as a Jew. Presumably

to boost his book sales with sensational revelations about the SS leader-

ship, Himmler’s Finnish masseur, Felix Kersten, maintained in his highly

unreliable memoirs that both Himmler and Hitler had known about

Heydrich’s ‘dark secret’ from the early 1930s onwards, but chose to use the

‘highly talented, but also very dangerous man’ for the dirtiest deeds of

the regime.9

Wighton was not alone in fal ing for the myth of Heydrich’s Jewish

origins. In his preface to the Kersten memoirs, Hugh Trevor-Roper

confirmed ‘with al the authority that I possess’ that Heydrich was a Jew – a

view supported by eminent German historians such as Karl Dietrich

Bracher and the Hitler biographer Joachim Fest.10 Fest’s brief character

sketch of Heydrich – characteristical y bril iant in style but unconvincing in

content – added fuel to the popular debate about Heydrich’s al egedly split

personality. Fest reiterated the rumours about Heydrich’s Jewish family

background and attributed his actions to a self-loathing anti-Semitism. As

a schizophrenic maniac driven by self-hatred, Heydrich wanted to prove his

worth and became a ‘man like a whiplash’, running the Nazi terror

apparatus with ‘Luciferic coldness’ in order to achieve his ultimate goal of

becoming ‘Hitler’s successor’.11

Fest’s characterization of Heydrich was called into question by the

emergence of a second influential image of senior SS officers, which is

captured in the iconic photograph of Adolf Eichmann in his glass booth

xvi

INTRODUCTION

in the Jerusalem District Court. Hannah Arendt’s famous account of

that trial and her dictum about the ‘banality of evil’ shaped the public

perception of SS men in the decades that followed.12 For many years, the

bureaucratic ‘technocrat of death’ – the perversely rational culprit behind

a desk – became the dominant image of Nazi perpetrators. These perpe-

trators focused on their duties, accepted the administrative tasks assigned

to them and carried them out ‘correctly’ and ‘conscientiously’ without

feeling responsible for their outcomes.13 The mass murder of the Jews was

now seen not so much as a throwback to barbarism, but as the zenith of

modern bureaucracy and dehumanizing technology that found its ulti-

mate expression in the anonymous killing factories of Auschwitz.

Mass murder was represented as a sanitized process carried out by profes-

sional men – doctors and lawyers, demographers and agronomists – who

acted on the basis of amoral but seemingly rational decisions derived from

racial eugenics, geo-political considerations and economic planning.14

Such images strongly impacted on another popular Heydrich biog-

raphy, first published in 1977: Günther Deschner’s
The Pursuit of Total

Power
. Deschner, a former writer for the conservative daily
Die Welt
,

rightly dismissed the pseudo-psychological demonizations of Wighton

and Fest. Instead he followed the prevalent trend of the 1970s and 1980s

in describing Heydrich as the archetype of a high-level technocrat prima-

rily interested in efficiency, performance and total power, for whom Nazi

ideology was first and foremost a vehicle for careerism. Ideology, Deschner

suggested, was something Heydrich was too intelligent to take seriously.15

If the popular perception of Heydrich as the Third Reich’s cold-blooded

‘administrator of death’ has remained largely unchallenged over the years,

the basic tenets on which this image rests have been well and truly eroded

in the last two decades. First, it is now clear that ideology played a

key motivational role for senior SS officers and that any attempt to

dismiss them as pathologically disturbed outsiders is highly misleading. If

anything, SS perpetrators tended to be
more
educated than their average

German or Western European contemporaries. More often than not, they

were socially mobile and ambitious young university graduates from

perfectly intact family backgrounds, by no means part of a deranged

minority of extremists from the criminal margins of society.16

Second, it is now generally accepted that the decision-making processes

which led to the Holocaust developed through several stages of gradual

radicalization. The idea that Heydrich consciously planned the Holocaust

from the early 1930s onwards, as was still argued by his biographer

Eduard Calic in the 1980s, is a position that is no longer tenable.17

Although central to the development of persecution policies in Nazi

Germany, Heydrich was only one of a large variety of actors in Berlin and

I N T R O D U C T I O N

xvii

German-occupied Europe who pushed for more and more extreme

measures of exclusion and, ultimately, mass murder. Nazi Germany was

not a smoothly hierarchical dictatorship, but rather a ‘polycratic jungle’ of

competing party and state agencies over which Hitler presided eratically.

The ‘cumulative radicalization’ in certain policy areas emerged as a result

of tensions and conflicts between powerful individuals and interest groups

who sought to please their Führer by anticipating his orders.18 Within this

complex power structure, individuals contributed to Nazi policies of

persecution and murder for a whole range of reasons, from ideological

commitment and hyper-nationalism to careerism, greed, sadism, weakness

or – more realistically – a combination of more than one of these

elements.19

For a biographer of Heydrich, the revisionist arguments of the past

decades pose a whole series of difficult questions. If the Holocaust was not

a smoothly unfolding, centralized genocide and Heydrich and Himmler

were not responsible for every aspect of the persecution and mass murder

of the Jews, what exactly were they responsible for?20 If, as some historians

quite rightly suggest, the Holocaust was merely a first step towards the

bloody unweaving of Europe’s complex ethnic make-up, what role did

Heydrich play in the evolution and implementation of these plans?21 Even

more fundamentally: how did he ‘become’ Heydrich?

The answers provided in this book revise some older assumptions about

Heydrich’s personal transition to Nazism and his contribution to some of

the worst crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich. Born as he

was in 1904 into a privileged Catholic family of professional musicians in

the city of Hal e, Heydrich’s path to genocide was anything but straight-

forward. Not only was his life conditioned by several unforeseeable events

that were often beyond his control, but his actions can be ful y explained

only by placing them in the wider context of the intel ectual, political,

cultural and socio-economic conditions that shaped German history in the

first half of the twentieth century.

Heydrich was both a typical and an atypical representative of his

generation. He shared in many of the deep ruptures and traumatic experi-

ences of the so-called war youth generation: namely, the Great War

and the turbulent post-war years of revolutionary turmoil, hyperinflation

and social decline, which he experienced as a teenager. Yet while these

experiences made him and many other Germans susceptible to radical

nationalism, Heydrich refrained from political activism throughout the

1920s and was even ostracized by his fellow naval officers for not being