Hitler's Hangman (55 page)

and Czech mass demonstrations the following month, the Nazi grip on

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Czech society began to tighten. The predicament of Jews, in particular,

deteriorated rapidly. Their persecution had begun immediately after the

German invasion, when the Nuremberg Laws were applied to Protectorate

Jews. Until September 1939 Czech Jews had still been able to emigrate,

but the outbreak of war closed all doors for Jewish émigrés. More repres-

sive laws followed in a process that was overseen by Heydrich’s Jewish

expert in Prague, Adolf Eichmann: as of 1940 Jewish identification cards

were stamped with a ‘J’; and in late August 1941 Neurath issued an order

that from 1 September that year onwards all Jews in the Protectorate over

the age of six had to wear a yellow star. Mirroring regulations introduced

earlier in the General Government, the star was to be sewn on the left

front of their clothing. Only Jews in privileged mixed marriages were

exempt.7

Alterations to German occupation policy affected the rest of society, too.

As soon as the war began, newspapers and posters across the Protectorate

announced that any act of resistance would result in a death sentence. In

November 1939, following a number of violent demonstrations in Prague

and other cities, the Nazis responded with the arrest of student protesters

and the closure of Czech universities, initially for a period of three years.

The wave of arrests swept up thousands of intellectuals, priests, Communists

Social Democrats and Jewish community leaders.8

The second year of the Nazi occupation thus constituted a radical break

from the comparatively lenient regime of 1939. It also marked a turning

point for the Czech resistance. Previously, resistance had been highly

fragmented. Apart from the Communist underground composed of the

remnants of the KSČ (the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia), three

democratic resistance groups formed shortly after the German invasion:

the Political Centre (Politické Ústředí or PÚ), the Committee of the

Petition ‘We Remain Faithful!’ (Petićní výbor ‘Vĕrni zůstaneme!’ or

PVVZ), and the Nation’s Defence (Obrana národa or ON). In addition,

sizeable sports associations such as the Sokol served as a reservoir for

recruitment into the underground resistance.9 Under the pressure gener-

ated by the mass arrests in the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1940,

the three major non-Communist resistance organisations – PÚ, PVVZ

and ON – consolidated their ranks under the Central Leadership of

Home Resistance (Ústřední vedení odboje domácího or ÚVOD), which

served as the principal clandestine intermediary between the London-

based Czechoslovak government-in-exile and the resistance within the

Protectorate.10

It was only after the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June

1941 that resistance activities in the Protectorate, as in many other coun-

tries under Nazi rule, began to develop on a noticeable scale, as Neurath

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221

had to admit in a report to Hitler.11 In early September, resistance activi-

ties in the Protectorate culminated in a number of strikes and ‘work

slowly’ campaigns that triggered an average fall of 18 per cent in the

Protectorate’s industrial production. Telephone wires across Bohemia and

Moravia were cut, railway carriages set on fire, and the resistance organ-

ized a successful one-week boycott of the German-controlled Protectorate

press. Simultaneously, the number of Communist underground leaflets

distributed across the Protectorate rose dramatically from 377 in June

1941 to 3,797 in July, peaking at 10,727 in October.12

The leaflet campaign showed that the Communist resistance, most

adept at underground work, had overcome the involuntary paralysis

induced by the Hitler–Stalin Pact of August 1939. As a wave of strikes,

sabotage actions and assassinations of German military personnel swept

across various occupied countries in the late summer and autumn of 1941,

Hitler was convinced that only draconian punishment would prevent

opposition to German rule from spreading further. On 16 September he

called for ‘the most drastic means’ to be employed against any provocation,

while Keitel demanded that fifty to a hundred Communist hostages be

shot for every German soldier killed by partisans. Although military

commanders in Serbia, France, Belgium and Norway responded with

mass arrests, the shooting of hostages and other reprisals, acts of resistance

nonetheless continued on a worrying scale.13

From the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941,

Heydrich had been one of the most outspoken advocates of a ‘tough’

response to the challenge posed by indigenous resistance, ordering local

Sipo commanders to use ‘intensified interrogation methods’ (that is,

torture) to obtain information about ‘wire-pullers’. Simultaneously, he

issued an order that ‘hostile Czechs and Poles as well as Communists and

other scumbags must be transferred to a concentration camp for longer

periods of time’. In early September 1941, Heydrich flew to Norway,

where a strike wave had reached alarming proportions. He met with Reich

Commissioner Terboven, who shortly afterwards – on 10 September –

took his advice and imposed martial law in Oslo.14

In the Netherlands the commander of the Security Police, Wilhelm

Harster, also acted on Heydrich’s orders and undertook mass arrests

following the German attack on the Soviet Union. In September, he had

the conservative former Dutch Prime Minister Hendrikus Colijn arrested

on a charge of espionage.15 Also in September, Heydrich ordered the

arrest and shooting of members of the Ukrainian Organization of

Nationalists, whom, despite their firmly anti-Bolshevik stance, he consid-

ered to be a potential source of unrest in the rear of the rapidly advancing

Wehrmacht.16

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The noticeable increase in resistance activities confirmed Heydrich’s

belief that the time was ripe for a more comprehensive assertion of SS

authority in the running of German-controlled Europe. On 18 September,

the same day that he and Himmler embarked on a three-day inspection

tour of the conquered Baltic territories, he submitted a far-reaching

proposal to Lammers, reminding him ‘that the securing of the Reich, the

protection of its frontiers . . . the combating of espionage and political

subversion, as well as the struggle against international crime’ were of

‘decisive importance’. For this reason, he included a draft Führer order

granting the SS further police competences in the General Government

and the Protectorate, as well as in the territories of Western Europe under

civil administration (Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and

Norway). The SS and police should henceforth assume responsibility for

all matters of ‘internal political security’ within the Nazi Empire, not

merely for matters of ‘police security’.17

Although the proposal was never put to Hitler for fear of provoking

severe conflict between the SS, Rosenberg and the heads of the civil and

military administrations in the occupied territories, it offers a revealing

glimpse into Heydrich’s strategic thinking. From very early on in his SS

career, Heydrich had realized that the best way of increasing his personal

powers and those of the SS more general y was to paint an overly dramatic

picture of the strength of opposition with which Nazism was confronted.

In 1932, he had deliberately used the exaggerated notion of a Nazi move-

ment undermined by spies and traitors to build up his SD; in the mid-

1930s, when the Communist movement in Germany was largely

suppressed, he developed the idea of largely invisible enemies of Nazism

whose power could be broken only by a significant SS police formation

with extra-legal means. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he

instrumentalized the widespread fear of partisans to extend continuously

his brief of fighting an il usive network of broadly defined enemies.

Now that concern about the intensification of resistance in the occupied

territories was growing within the Nazi leadership and among senior

military figures, he used the same argument: only the SS had the experi-

ence and determination to fight resistance activities effectively before they

could escalate on a truly threatening scale. Heydrich’s track-record in

combating the enemies of the Reich both at home and abroad undoubt-

edly contributed to the decision of Martin Bormann, a party hardliner

who had emerged as head of the Party Chancel ery after Rudolf Hess’s

flight to Scotland in May 1941, to recommend him to the Führer as an

appropriate candidate to serve as acting Reich Protector in Bohemia and

Moravia where strikes and ‘work slowly’ campaigns had begun to under-

mine the German war effort.

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223

Heydrich was well informed about the deteriorating situation in the

Protectorate through the regular reports he received from the Gestapo

and SD offices in Bohemia and Moravia. The information gathered by his

agents and transmitted to Berlin, where it was summarized and collated

for the Nazi leadership, helped to create the impression that Neurath was

no longer in control of the situation. Although there is no hard evidence

to suggest that Heydrich actively pursued Neurath’s replacement and his

own nomination as Reich Protector, he certainly pressed for a consider-

able extension of SS responsibilities in the Protectorate, thus, in effect,

undermining Neurath’s position.18

Concerned about the declining productivity of the Czech armaments

industry and the resistance activities outlined in the SD reports, Hitler

decided to replace Neurath in late September 1941. On Bormann’s

recommendation, the Führer ordered Neurath, the Higher SS and Police

Leader in the Protectorate, Karl Hermann Frank, and Heydrich to join

him at his military headquarters, the Wolf ’s Lair near Rastenburg in East

Prussia. Here he disclosed his decision that Neurath would be sent on

indefinite ‘sick leave’ and Heydrich would be dispatched to Prague in his

stead. Hitler’s decision implied more than an exchange of personnel: it

reflected his determination to replace Neurath’s restraint and ‘unsuc-

cessful’ occupation policy in the Protectorate with a campaign of terror.19

The second, and in many ways related, reason for Heydrich’s appoint-

ment was Hitler’s reversal on the issue of Jewish deportations from the

Reich. As late as mid-August 1941, he had made it clear that these depor-

tations could take place only after the defeat of the Soviet Union.

However, from the second week of September, and presumably encour-

aged by major Wehrmacht breakthroughs on the Eastern Front that

would soon lead to the encirclement of Leningrad and the fall of Kiev, the

Führer was prepared to revise his decision.20

After Hitler had turned down Heydrich’s proposal for the complete

deportation of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate in August, the

RSHA began to work on a proposal for a partial evacuation during the

war – a wave of deportations that would primarily affect those Jews living

in the larger cities.21 Such a proposal was more agreeable to Hitler in mid-

September, when military advances on the Russian front made the east-

ward deportations possible and when increasing pressure from the Reich’s

Gauleiters to turn their fiefdom’s into ‘Jew free’ zones, thus easing the

housing problem created by Allied bombings of German cities, also made

deportations politically desirable. On 18 September Himmler informed

Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau that it was Hitler’s expressed wish ‘that

the Old Reich and the Protectorate be emptied and freed of Jews from

west to east as quickly as possible’. As a ‘first step’, Himmler continued,

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the Jews would be deported into occupied Poland before moving them

‘further east next spring’. Some 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and the

Protectorate would thus have to be interned in the Łódź ghetto, in the

annexed Warthegau, over the winter.22

When Heydrich met with Goebbels at the Führer headquarters on the

day of his appointment as acting Reich Protector, Goebbels expressed

similar sentiments and emphasized that ‘in the end’ the Jews of the Reich

would be ‘transported into the camps that have been erected by the

Bolsheviks. These camps were built by the Jews, so what could be more

fitting than populating them with Jews?’ Goebbels also confirmed in his

diary on the same day that the ‘Führer is of the opinion that the Jews are