Hitler's Hangman (62 page)

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

including a number of prominent Prague-based academics such as Karl

Valentin Müller and Hans Joachim Beyer.136 Müller, a social anthropolo-

gist with expertise in eugenics and excellent connections in the RSHA,

had a particularly strong influence on Heydrich’s perception of the

Germanization problem in the Protectorate. Shortly after Heydrich’s

arrival in Bohemia and Moravia, on 6 November 1941, Müller was

appointed to a newly created chair of social anthropology in Prague where

he devoted most of his time to the pursuit of questions of ‘ethnic re-

engineering [
Umvolkung
]’ and Germanization, the results of which were

of ‘greatest interest to the Reich Protector’.137

Müller maintained that a substantial proportion of the Czech popula-

tion were originally of German origin, but that their blood had been

mixed with and contaminated by Slavic influences. To regain and cultivate

this German blood, Müller argued, was imperative for the overall

Germanization process.138 He expanded on this line of thought in two

memoranda which he submitted to the head of the Prague SD, Horst

Böhme, in the autumn of 1941, arguing that roughly 50 per cent of the

Czech population contained valuable German blood – a figure that

Heydrich immediately picked up from the report.139

Hans Joachim Beyer was the second demographer to have a major

impact on Heydrich’s thinking. Born near Hamburg in 1908, Beyer had

studied history, law and anthropology and joined the SA, in timely

fashion, in July 1933. By 1935, he had published his first book, in which

he argued that Bohemia had traditionally been an area of German settle-

ment. Only after the devastations brought about by the early fifteenth-

century Bohemian Wars against and among the followers of Jan Hus had

the Czechs begun to outnumber the German settlers. To revise that

historical aberration, Beyer suggested, was of critical importance.140

Over the following years, Beyer continued to work on his dual concept

of ‘depopulation’ and ‘repopulation’, arguing among other things that

ethnic Germans should disassimilate themselves from their Slavic neigh-

bours, that racially mixed marriages should be entered into only with

partners of ‘related’ blood, and that the peoples of Eastern Europe should

be ranked according to their degree of German genetic influences.141 The

Czechs, he insisted, had the largest proportion of German blood which

needed to be ‘regained’.142 Such radical ideas quickly captured the atten-

tion of SS population planners and in 1938 Beyer was recruited into

the SD. His memoranda also kick-started his academic career. In 1940,

at the age of thirty-two, he was given a prestigious chair at Berlin’s

Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, although he continued to work simulta-

neously for Heydrich’s RSHA. In 1941, as an ethno-political advisor to SS

Einsatzgruppe
C, he marched into Lemberg, where Polish intellectuals

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251

whose names had been added to an arrest list compiled by Beyer himself

were murdered. His own experiences and impressions of Galicia formed

the empirical basis of his next academic publications in which he described

the Polish leadership, ‘contaminated’ by Jewish blood, as a group of people

outside the margins of European society, who should never be allowed to

play a part in the continent’s history again.143

After a brief stint at the Reich University in Posen in September 1941,

Heydrich insisted on Beyer’s transfer to the German University in Prague

where he acted as Heydrich’s chief demographic adviser and director of

the Institute for European Anthropology and Peoples’ Psychology within

the newly founded Reinhard Heydrich Foundation, an umbrella organiza-

tion for all academic institutions in Prague with a focus on the anthropo-

logical and demographic study of Eastern and South-eastern Europe.144

Armed with the pseudo-scientific knowledge gathered in Müller’s and

Beyer’s memoranda as well as in Meyer’s General Plan East, Heydrich

confidently talked about racial hierarchies in the newly conquered territo-

ries, hierarchies in which the Poles, East Ukrainians and Belorussians,

who had been ‘contaminated’ by mixing with various Soviet peoples and

Bolshevik ideas, assumed the lowest positions. Some of the neighbouring

Baltic peoples were racially less inferior than others. ‘The best racial

elements are found among the Estonians,’ Heydrich stated with absolute

certainty, ‘because of the Swedish influence, then come the Latvians with

the Lithuanians being the worst of them all.’145

For the Protectorate, too, Heydrich imagined categories into which indi-

viduals might be placed. ‘Racial y good’ and ‘wel -intentioned’ Czechs, he

announced, would certainly become Germans. ‘Racial y bad’ and ‘il -

intentioned’ Czechs would be ‘removed’ to the ‘wide spaces’ of the East.

Racial y inferior Czechs with good intentions would be sterilized and then

resettled in the Old Reich where they would be exploited as slave labourers.

‘Il -intentioned’ but ‘racial y good’ Czechs, the ‘most dangerous of them al ’,

would be ‘put up against the wal ’. Two-thirds of the population would

immediately fal into one category or another. The remaining, less easily

label ed people in the middle would be sorted out in a few years’ time.146

Here again, Heydrich drew on racial categories and policies that had

first been implemented in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1939 and 1940.

Confronted with the mind-boggling ethnic complexity of East-Central

Europe, Himmler and the race experts of the RuSHA had created four

categories of racial value corresponding to those that had previously been

applied to SS candidates: the categories were ‘racially top’, ‘good or average’,

‘borderline cases’ and ‘racially unfit and alien blood’. This categorization of

persons as ‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’ was to guide Nazi population policy

and the entire ethnic reconstruction of Europe.147

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

In addition, on 30 September 1941, Himmler had decreed that ‘border-

line case’ candidates who had previously acquired German citizenship

through a place on the so-called People’s List (the
Volksliste
, first intro-

duced by Arthur Greiser, the Gauleiter of Wartheland, as a means of regis-

tering German citizens in his fiefdom) on the grounds of ‘political merit’,

social qualities or language skills were to be re-examined according to racial

criteria. All persons with ‘uncertain’ German roots – totalling more than

1 million people – were to be screened from late 1941 onwards, and

the results were to be entered on the individual’s racial identity card

(
Kennkarte
).148 Heydrich, whose RSHA oversaw the activities of both the

Central Office for Emigration (UWZ), responsible for expulsion and the

collection of racial data, and the Central Office for Immigration (EWZ),

in charge of naturalizing ethnic Germans from formerly non-German

territories, was familiar with the underlying issues of ‘ethnic engineering’.149

In early February 1942, encouraged by a meeting with Hitler less than a

week before, Heydrich once again pointed to Germanization as the overall

aim of Nazi rule in the Protectorate:150

I would like to underline clearly as our internal principle that

Germanization is intended, but only for those who are genuinely

Germanizable. This requires that we shall now covertly proceed to

undertake a racial inventory. It is entirely clear: if I want to Germanize,

I have to know first who is Germanizable. I still reckon with a figure

between forty and sixty per cent. This racial inventory will now proceed

by means of an identity card . . . By using identity-card checks, we will

probably be able to sift out around a third of those who are not

Germanizable to begin with, and perhaps we can identify another third

of those whom we consider to be superficially Germanizable. That will

leave roughly one-third of the population who will still have to be tested

in a first brief examination. This means that we can reduce the time

needed for the racial inventory from three years to one, which is both

practical and desirable.151

Heydrich did not specify exactly how racial experts would place

Czechs into one of these racial categories. Unlike the labelling of Jews

and Gypsies, comparatively small minorities after all, testing for

Germanizability involved the entire Czech population. The matter was

further complicated by the fact that there was no unambiguous definition

of what constituted a Slav or a German.152 Heydrich argued that real or

potential Germans could be spotted by their blue eyes, pleasing bodies,

height and well-shaped heads. Yet he was also surprisingly open to a

non-biological understanding of Germanness: often, he argued, it was

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253

non-physical characteristics that betrayed a German heritage. Clean

houses, virility, sexual morality and social behaviour were criteria for

membership. The most willing Germans among the Czechs, those

‘unprincipled scoundrels’ and ‘rubbish’, were the least suitable candidates.

Ironically, Heydrich felt that it was the Czech patriots dedicated to their

cause, healthy and independent, who would make the best Germans.153

As Heydrich pointed out on various occasions, the situation in the

Protectorate was particularly complicated since al of the most prominent

Czechs had some German blood. The mother of Alois Eliáš, he told Hitler,

seemed from her outward appearance to be a German.154 Jaroslav Krejćí’s

‘beautiful blue eyes’, Heydrich decided, meant that the newly appointed

Czech Minister of Justice certainly had a German background. Hácha, on the

other hand, was considered ‘incapable of Germanization’ by Heydrich because

he ‘is always sick, arrives with a trembling voice and attempts to evoke a pity

that demands our mercy’. As Heydrich made clear, behaviour, mental disposi-

tion, and physiognomy, could be key indicators of someone’s ‘racial core’.155

As the only leading SS officer occupying key positions at both the

centre of the Nazi Empire and its territorial periphery, Heydrich’s ability

to drive and contour Nazi Germanization policies was unparalleled in

Europe. No other administration in Nazi-controlled Europe – with the

possible exception of Greiser’s Warthegau – ever attempted so ambitious

a policy of racial classification and separation in so short a time. Under

Heydrich’s rule in Prague, the testing and registration process intensified

dramatically. In the autumn of 1941, his office announced plans to have

experts from the Race and Settlement Office examine Czech women who

had married Germans before the occupation. Also to be examined were

children born out of wedlock to Czech–German partners. In May

Heydrich reported to Bormann that Race and Settlement Office experts

had fanned out across the Protectorate. Their aim was to produce a racially

ordered cross-section of society, all done under the cover of a

Protectorate-wide campaign against tuberculosis.156

Although aimed at facilitating the distant goal of Germanization,

Heydrich’s testing and registration schemes had immediate consequences

for Protectorate inhabitants. A ‘racially unsuitable’ Czech man who had

had sexual intercourse with a German woman was sent to a concentration

camp. If a marriage was approved, the male candidate was identified as a

German, in the eyes of both his compatriots and the state, and was there-

fore treated differently. Czech mothers married to Germans were required

to raise their children as Germans. Failure to do so meant having their

children put up for adoption. Anyone not carrying a new identity card, the

Kennkarte
, was immediately arrested, allowing police authorities more

easily to track down parachutists, partisans, and Jews in hiding.157

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Another important tool of Heydrich’s Germanization policies in the

Protectorate was the so-called Land Office (
Bodenamt
), an SS-controlled

property administration in charge of identifying and confiscating Czech

property targeted for Germanization.158 Already on 17 October 1941

Heydrich had announced to senior members of his staff in Prague that

the Land Office was ‘the only appropriate agency’ for the ‘gradual

Germanization of the East’.159 His idea to create ‘islands of Germandom’

in densely populated Slavic areas through the confiscation of Czech prop-

erty provided an inspiration for the extensive settlement projects imple-