Hitler's Hangman (56 page)

to be removed from Germany step by step. The first cities to be cleared of

Jews are Berlin, Vienna and Prague.’23

That Heydrich was installed as acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and

Moravia at precisely the time that the Nazi leadership decided on a

further radicalization of anti-Jewish policies was hardly coincidental. Now

that Hitler had selected Prague, alongside Berlin and Vienna, as one of

the first major cities to be rendered ‘Jew-free’, Heydrich must have seemed

to be the obvious choice to guarantee a swift implementation of his

wishes.

Heydrich’s arrival in Prague thus coincided with the very moment

when Hitler and Himmler, prompted by the rapid advance of the German

armies into the Soviet Union, began to think about the racial reordering

of the conquered territories, and the creation of Germany’s Garden of

Eden in the East. Heydrich’s policies in the Protectorate over the

following months suggest that he was sent to Prague not only to restore

order – a task that could have been undertaken by a less prominent SS

officer such as the Protectorate’s higher SS and police leader, Karl

Hermann Frank – but also to initiate and oversee the next radical steps in

the Nazis’ racial policies. These involved the beginning of deportations of

all Jews from Germany and the Protectorate, and the commencement of

preparations for the full racial integration of Bohemia and Moravia into

the Reich, thus testing anti-Semitic policies that were soon to be employed

in the entire Reich as well as even more far-reaching policies of ethnic

engineering that Hitler and Himmler intended to carry out in all border

regions considered to be Germanizable after the war’s end.

For Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Goebbels in particular, the simul-

taneous intensification of repressive measures against the various resist-

ance movements in occupied Europe, the escalation of the systematic

murder of Jews in the Soviet Union and the deportation of Jews from the

Reich were logically connected. Since they assumed that Communism

and Jewry were largely identical, they were convinced that the Jews were

R E I C H P R OT E C TO R

225

also the key engineers of anti-German resistance movements in the occu-

pied territories. To some extent, this logic became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With few other options for survival available, many Jews in the Baltic

States and in Belorussia gravitated towards the Communist partisans

active in the forests of the occupied territories.24

Heydrich must nonetheless have been ambivalent about Hitler’s deci-

sion to appoint him acting Reich Protector. He was keen to see his influ-

ence on Protectorate policies increase, but that could have been achieved

by extending SS powers over policing matters under the command of one

of his trusted associates. The idea of leaving Berlin, the centre of power in

Nazi Germany, at a time when military victory over the Soviet Union

seemed imminent, may have made Heydrich suspicious that ulterior

motives were behind his new appointment. But the pill was sweetened in

various ways. In true Nazi style, Heydrich took on the new responsibilities

not instead of but in addition to the offices he had already accumulated.

He also knew that this new task would allow him to implement SS

policies without having to take into consideration the objections of

reluctant administrators or Nazi Party Gauleiters. A promotion to

SS-
Obergruppenführer
and general of the police also came with his new

assignment, but most importantly, perhaps, the new position opened up

direct access to Hitler, since the Reich Protector was answerable only to

the Führer himself.

It has often been maintained that this appointment and Heydrich’s

growing independence from the Reich Leader SS created tensions

between Heydrich and Himmler, but there is no concrete evidence to

suggest that their relationship deteriorated after September 1941. Quite

the opposite: over the following months, their collaboration on

Germanization policies, anti-Jewish persecution and policing in the occu-

pied territories further developed, and there is no indication that Heydrich’s

loyalty towards his mentor was ever in question.25

After a long conversation with Himmler at the Wolf ’s Lair on

24 September, Heydrich called his wife from Rastenburg to report the

‘extraordinary news’ of his appointment as acting Reich Protector. When

he told Lina that, for the time being, she and their three children would

remain in Berlin and that he would he would go to Prague alone, his wife

was anything but excited. Already infuriated by his constant absences and

his neglect of family matters, she expressed her deep frustration. His

assurances that he would be in Berlin for many of the weeks ahead did not

improve the situation.26

Early in the afternoon of 27 September, Heydrich arrived at Prague’s

Ruzyně airport, where he was welcomed by the Higher SS and Police

Leader in the Protectorate, Karl Hermann Frank. Born in 1889 to a

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

family of Sudeten Germans in Karlsbad, Frank had served in the Austrian

army during the Great War and spent a year studying law in Prague before

leaving university to work at a number of small, badly paid jobs. He joined

Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German movement in 1933 and quickly rose

to become Henlein’s party deputy, a post he was to keep until the German

occupation when he became higher SS and police leader in the Protectorate.

Frank had been a close collaborator of Heydrich’s for several years and

even if he was disappointed at not having been appointed Reich Protector

himself, he remained a most loyal servant.27

After a brief sight-seeing tour of the city, Heydrich moved into his new

lodgings in the left wing of Černín Palace. The following morning, after

reviewing a guard of honour in front of the castle, he officially assumed

his new post and the black flag of the SS was raised over the turrets and

spires of the city.28

Pacifying the Czechs

Less than a week after his arrival in Prague, on 2 October 1941, Heydrich

addressed a gathering of senior Protectorate officials and Nazi party func-

tionaries at the Černín Palace. He normal y dreaded giving public speeches,

repeatedly rehearsing them in front of his wife who then commented on his

performance, but this time was different.29 As he walked into the Černín

Palace’s reception hal , resplendent in his new SS general’s uniform and

surrounded by obsequious aides, Heydrich had every reason to be confident.

By the autumn of 1941, Germany occupied almost one-third of the

European continent and ruled nearly half its inhabitants. The stunning

victories of the Wehrmacht in the first week of October, which brought the

German army close to the outskirts of Moscow, made him confident that

the Soviet Union’s surrender was only a matter of days.

In his speech, Heydrich emphasized that his approach to the internal

affairs of the Protectorate would differ fundamentally from that of his

predecessor. Unlike Neurath, he would build on his long-standing experi-

ence in fighting enemies of the Reich. The task set for him by the Führer

was a clearly defined ‘combat task’ for the SS, not a diplomatic mission.

His most pressing short-term goal in Prague, Heydrich explained, was

therefore the ‘pacification’ of the Protectorate in order to safeguard

Germany’s vital economic and security interests in the area. Industrial

sabotage and other resistance activities were to be brought to an imme-

diate end. Heydrich urged his audience always to bear in mind that ‘the

Czech is a Slav’ who ‘interprets any form of kindness as weakness’. For

that reason, his first move would be to ‘show them who is the master in

this house’. According to one witness, Heydrich added that anyone who

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227

disapproved of his measures would be issued with a one-way ticket to

Germany or the Eastern Front.30

When Heydrich spoke on 2 October, the first phase of his programme

of pacification had, in fact, already been in operation for several days. On

the very day of his arrival in Prague, he proclaimed martial law over the

Protectorate in order to demonstrate his determination to act upon the

promise that ‘treason at the rear of the front will be punished most

severely’.31 Martial law allowed for the establishment of summary courts

which, staffed with members of the SD and the Sipo, could pass only

three possible verdicts: the death sentence, shipment to a concentration

camp or release. Within days of his arrival, buildings across the Protectorate

were splattered with red posters listing the names of people sentenced to

death by the new courts. In the first three days of Heydrich’s rule, ninety-

two defendants were sentenced to death. On 30 September alone, fifty-

eight people were executed and 256 sent to Gestapo prisons. Only one

person accused and put on trial was found innocent.32

The official death sentences represented only a small proportion of

those arrested. For ‘psychological reasons’, Heydrich wished the number

of official executions to decline gradually, creating the impression that

calm had been restored and encouraging popular co-operation.33 This was

nothing more than propaganda: all in all, between Heydrich’s arrival in

Prague and the end of November 1941, a total of 404 official death

sentences were carried out (the vast majority against members of the

Czech resistance) and some 6,000 arrests were made. All domestic resist-

ance groups suffered dramatic losses, in terms both of human lives and of

equipment. Hundreds of people disappeared in the Gestapo cellars below

the Pećek Palace. In identifying and arresting enemies of the state,

Heydrich could draw on a substantial apparatus in the Protectorate. That

autumn 1,841 Gestapo officers operated in Bohemia and Moravia to

monitor a population of 10.3 million people. Each Gestapo officer was

therefore responsible for 5,600 Czechs, a density of political supervision

that was not as high as Communist surveillance levels in the Soviet

Union, but was twice as high as that in the Old Reich.34

Many of the Czechs convicted but not immediately executed boarded

one of five transports to the Mauthausen concentration camp in the

winter of 1941–2. Of the 1,299 Czech people sent to Mauthausen, only 4

per cent survived the war. In addition, 1,487 Czechs accused of political

crimes were sent to Auschwitz. Few of them returned.35 More than 1,500

of Heydrich’s victims had belonged to nationalist organizations, such as

the popular patriotic sports organization Sokol, which was dissolved on 11

October 1941 and whose considerable assets worth 1.12 billion Czech

crowns were confiscated. In addition, within the first four months of

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Heydrich’s rule, more than ninety illegal wireless transmitters were confis-

cated – a great success for the German security forces as they severed all

radio links between London and the Czech underground. These sweeps

nearly wiped out all organized resistance in the Protectorate.36

In late March 1942, after deciphering coded messages from arrested

Czech paratroopers, Heydrich’s Gestapo chalked up another important

success in arresting Paul Thümmel, a double agent who worked for both the

German Abwehr and, under the codename A-54, for Beneš’s government-

in-exile. Heydrich took a strong personal interest in the Thümmel case. As

a senior Abwehr officer and an Old Fighter in the Nazi movement with

strong resentments against political latecomers like Heydrich, Thümmel

combined two characteristics that Heydrich despised. Proving Thümmel’s

guilt was useful not only in the continuing quarrel with the Abwehr and the

army, but also in the power struggle with party representatives over political

supremacy in the occupied East. It helped to discredit these rivals and prove

to Hitler that the SS was the only reliable pil ar of the New Order. After his

arrest, Thümmel was held in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where

he was murdered by SS guards on 27 April 1945, only twelve days before

the end of the Second World War.37

With its leaders arrested and its radio networks destroyed, ÚVOD

essentially ceased to exist. As the Prague SD observed with bitterness,

only the Communist resistance survived, although it, too, suffered a large

number of arrests. Strikes and work slowdowns disappeared. Isolated acts

of sabotage continued, but few managed to hit vital targets such as tele-

phone and telegraph lines or armaments factories.38 A whole array of