Hitler's Hangman (60 page)

own preferences.96

In executing his powers, Neurath had relied both on the vast number of

staff in his office as wel as on thirty-five (from 1941 onwards, fifteen)

Oberlandräte
who were responsible for the local German administration,

the German police, citizenship registration and Czech–German relations

within their respective fiefdoms.97 Heydrich believed that the paral el

German and Czech administrations were far too big, thus hindering rather

than speeding up decision-making processes. He curbed the independence

of the
Oberlandräte
by assigning each of them an SS officer. He also

shut eight of their offices down, reducing the number of
Oberlandräte
to

seven, while hoping to get rid of them altogether at a later stage.98

One-sixth of the Protectorate’s German civil servants, some 50,000 men,

Heydrich claimed in a self-congratulatory report for Hitler, would soon be

‘freed up for military service’.99 Even close associates such as Heydrich’s

State Under Secretary, Kurt von Burgsdorff, were released from their

duties in March 1942 and sent off to the Eastern Front. Before Heydrich’s

tenure had begun, 9,362 Germans worked in the Reich Protector’s Office

and a further 4,706 were assigned to Czech agencies. According to

Heydrich’s plans, fol owing the conclusion of the reform only 1,100

Germans would remain in the Protectorate administration and 700 in the

offices of the Reich Protector and the
Oberlandräte
.100 Heydrich told his

staff that the Office of the Reich Protector would ‘final y become what it

must be: a leadership apparatus with a smal number of outstanding

personnel’.101

Heydrich’s reforms and his ability to pacify the Protectorate were noted

with great approval in Berlin. ‘The policy that Heydrich has pursued in the

Protectorate’, an impressed Goebbels noted in his diary, ‘can be described

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

as nothing short of exemplary. He has mastered the crisis there with ease

and the result is that the Protectorate is now in the best of spirits, in great

contrast to other occupied and annexed areas.’102 Hitler, too, expressed his

satisfaction. In a rambling after-dinner monologue in January 1942, he

praised the German occupation policy in Prague as ‘pitiless and brutal’.103

Four months later, on 20 May, the Führer added:

The right and, indeed for the German Reich, the obvious policy is firstly

to purge the country of all dangerous elements, and then to treat the

Czechs with friendly consideration. If we pursue a policy of this sort, all

the Czechs will follow the lead of President Hácha. In any case . . . the

fear of being compelled to evacuate their homes as the result of the

transfer of population we are undertaking will persuade them that it will

be in their best interests to emerge as zealous co-operators with the

Reich. It is this fear which besets them that explains why the Czechs at

the moment – and particularly at the war factories – are working to our

complete satisfaction.104

In reality, things on the ground were much less rosy than Heydrich was

willing to admit in his regular reports to Berlin. Although some workers

(most notably those in the armaments industry) received increased food

and tobacco rations, better welfare services, free shoes, paid holidays and,

for a time, Saturdays off, the situation for the majority of workers did not

improve.105 Heydrich’s propaganda campaigns and his perks for selected

labourers in the armaments industry could not conceal the fact that during

the eight months of his rule in Prague the food-supply situation had got

worse, not better. After January 1942, largely due to the military situation

in the East, butter allocation declined to 73 per cent of the level it had been

before Heydrich’s arrival in Prague while meat rations in the Protectorate

decreased from a total of more than 12,000 tonnes in September 1941 to

7,826 tonnes in March 1942. By the spring of 1942, SD agents noted

widespread grumbling among workers, but the growing dissatisfaction did

not translate into any significant decreases in productivity.106

In the meantime, Heydrich was busy fending off the repeated attempts

of other Nazi agencies to interfere in his sphere of influence. In the

Protectorate, just as in the Old Reich and other occupied territories, a

variety of agencies – from the army to party officials – vied for power and

influence. Heydrich particularly despised the Protectorate’s four Party

Gauleiters (of Sudetenland, Oberdonau, Niederdonau and Bayerische

Ostmark), repeatedly commenting on the mediocricy of party function-

aries whose physical appearance and intellectual potential contrasted

sharply with his own idea of leadership personalities.107

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

243

Heydrich’s scepticism about the party’s ability to rule the new German

Empire was no secret. According to his wife, he was deeply concerned

about the calibre of the party officials dispatched to subdue the Slavs,

privately condemning these ‘golden pheasants’ of the East as corrupt and

inefficient. Senior posts in the Eastern administrations were indeed often

reserved for Old Fighters or long-standing members of the Nazi Party,

many with close personal ties to Hitler. Their only qualification for admin-

istering occupied territories was the length of their party membership and

they, in turn, brought with them trusted party followers as administration

staff, many of whom were poorly trained, corrupt and therefore unsuitable

for service in Western Europe.108

Heydrich was nonetheless well aware that the four Gauleiters continued

to retain influential contacts in Berlin.109 Conscious that his powers in

Prague would not remain unchallenged if he did not assert his own

authority, he asked for Bormann’s renewed assurances that he was bound

to follow only the orders of the Führer himself, and not those of party

representatives.110 There was to be no more nonsense and interference

from party hacks in the implementation of SS policies. ‘With four

different methods working beneath mine,’ he stated to the Gauleiters after

receiving Bormann’s positive response, ‘I cannot rule the Czechs.’ In that

same speech he singled out the Reich Protector Office’s most determined

rival, the Gauleiter of Niederdonau, Hugo Jury, for disrupting his plans.

Other uncooperative Nazi Party officials were simply removed from their

posts.111

In May 1942, however, Heydrich had privately to acknowledge that the

Czech resistance movement, which he had considered to be crushed, had

regenerated and that incidents of sabotage were on the rise again. Having

informed Hitler in early October 1941 that the resistance was finally

broken and that the Czech workers had quietly accepted the liquidation

of resistance fighters, Heydrich did not want to admit that the situation

might once again get out of control. He repeatedly assured Berlin that

there was no cause for alarm.112

All of this was part of a cunning communication strategy designed

to present his activity in Prague in a positive light. In order to prevent the

discrepancy between his often sugar-coated reports and the reality on the

ground from leaking back to Berlin, Heydrich monopolized reports on

the situation in the Protectorate. He put an end to the daily and monthly

intelligence reports on the Protectorate and made sure that the SD

reports,
Meldungen aus dem Reich
, contained virtually no information on

his fiefdom from October 1941 onwards.113

During his eight months in Prague, Heydrich instead sent a total of

twenty-one reports on his activities in the Protectorate directly to Martin

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Bormann, insisting that the Führer be informed of their content. The

reports primarily served as a means of preserving his position in the Third

Reich’s power elite and presented developments in the Protectorate in a

triumphal light. They were not without success. On 15 February 1942,

Goebbels noted in his diary:

I had a long discussion with Heydrich about the situation in the

Protectorate. The situation there has been stabilized. Heydrich’s meas-

ures show good results . . . the danger of the Czechs threatening German

security in the Protectorate has been completely overcome. Heydrich

has been successful. He is playing cat-and-mouse with the Czechs and

they swallow everything he tells them. He has taken a series of extraor-

dinarily popular measures, including the almost complete elimination of

the black market . . . He emphasizes that the Slavs cannot be ruled in the

same way one rules a Germanic people; one must break them or

constantly bend them. He is apparently pursuing the second path, and

with success. Our task in the Protectorate is absolutely clear. Neurath

completely misunderstood it, and that is what led to the crisis in Prague

in the first place.114

Four months after his arrival at Prague Castle, Heydrich took stock of

the situation in the Protectorate: setting the stage for an appraisal of his

own achievements, he started by sharply criticizing the ‘fundamental

errors’ of German occupation policy in the Protectorate under Neurath,

who had treated ‘the Czechs and the Czech government as if this was an

independent state and as if the Reich Protector’s Office was merely an

enhanced delegation to a foreign president’. Neurath had also committed

tactical errors: ‘One cannot lead the Czech man and the Czech population

to the Reich by believing that it is possible to maintain influence over the

population through good social contacts with the Czech aristocracy.’

His own track-record, by contrast, was impressive, or so Heydrich

suggested. The short-term objectives of crushing the Czech resistance, of

stimulating the Protectorate’s war economy and of reorganizing the occu-

pation system had been achieved. Now, he said, it was time to pursue the

‘real objective’ or the ‘final aim’ of the German occupation which, ‘if not

otherwise possible’, should be implemented through ‘violent means’: the

Germanization of the Protectorate.115

Germanizing the Protectorate

The Germanization of the conquered territories and border regions – their

complete cultural, socio-economic, political and, above al , racial assimilation

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

245

into the Greater German Empire – remained at the very heart of SS popu-

lation policy throughout the Second World War. In essence, Germanization,

as Heydrich understood it, aimed at total control over the conquered popu-

lations, the obliteration of their former national character and the extermi-

nation of al elements that could not be reconciled with Nazi ideology. The

utopia of an ethnical y cleansed Greater German Empire in which racial y

suitable members of the conquered populations would be merged with the

German
Volk
was to be created through the identification of ‘valuable’ racial

stock among non-German populations, and the paral el expulsion and

murder of those deemed ‘racial y unsuitable’.116

The war in the East, Himmler told Heydrich and others in June 1941,

would be ‘a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which twenty

to thirty mil ion Slavs and Jews wil perish through military actions and a

crisis of food supply’. By the spring of 1942, more than 2 mil ion Soviet

soldiers in German captivity, along with countless Jewish and non-Jewish

non-combatants, had been kil ed. A further 1 mil ion civilians and prisoners

of war in or from the Reichskommisariat Ukraine lost their lives. And in

Belorussia, a territory home to 10.6 mil ion inhabitants in 1939, a total of

2.2 mil ion civilians and prisoners of war perished during the German occu-

pation.117 But what exactly was to happen to the surviving populations? In

order to gain a complete picture of the ‘racial stock’ of the newly occupied

territories, from the end of 1939 onwards SS racial experts of the Race and

Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) carried out ‘racial screenings’ of mil ions

of ethnic Germans and non-Germans across occupied Eastern Europe, the

results of which would determine the individual’s’ fate.118

Similar procedures were applied to Alsace, Lorraine and the Protectorate

of Bohemia and Moravia. In April 1940 the Reich Protector’s Office

decreed that all mixed Czech–German marriages would require the

approval of the local
Oberlandrat
while marriages between party members

and Czechs, Poles and Magyars fell under the jurisdiction of the local

Gauleiter. Local medical officers, party officials, government bureaucrats

and police submitted their own reports for the
Oberlandrat
’s consideration.