267
reading a constant stream of historical literature on the subject. Wallenstein’s
refusal to join the rebellious Bohemian and Moravian nobility during
the Thirty Years’ War and his decision to serve Emperor Ferdinand II
instead provided a model for Bohemia’s loyalty to the Reich. On Sundays,
Heydrich made several trips to Friedland, Wallenstein’s duchy. He
also visited Mĕlník, where he saw the grave of St Ludmila (Wenceslas’s
grandmother) and showed great interest in the excavations at Prague
Castle which were carried out by the staff of the German University of
Prague.222
Heydrich regarded the repression of indigenous cultures in occupied
Europe as an essential precondition for the creation of a flourishing
German culture in the East. This included a policy of ‘intellectual sterili-
zation’, permitting the local population no more than basic vocational
training. According to Heydrich, vocational experience and cultural
Germanization had to be the goals of the Czech education system. In the
autumn of 1941, he ordered that Czech history lessons at school were to
be cancelled in favour of German classes.223
Heydrich’s ‘educational policy’ was very much in line with Himmler’s
view, articulated in May 1940, that schooling for the local population in
the occupied territories should be reduced to ‘simple arithmetic up to 500
at most; writing one’s name; a doctrine that it is divine law to obey the
Germans and to be honest, industrious and good’.224 In February 1942,
Heydrich further announced that he intended to ‘strike violently’ at
the heart of the Czech teaching establishment, which he saw as the
‘training corps of the opposition’, and threatened that he would drastically
reduce the number of Czech secondary schools. Czech youth, he noted
bitterly, had for too long been misled by its ‘thoroughly chauvinistic
teachers’.225
The collaborationist press echoed the view that education was an
unnecessary luxury for the majority of the Czech population. On 1 May
1942, Labour Day, the widely circulated paper
České slovo
commented:
‘The fact that we have at present 70,000 secondary school pupils is
economically unbearable.’ Boys in secondary education, the paper argued,
should leave school immediately in order to become apprentices and
attend professional schools after training.226 The aim of these measures, as
a British Intelligence Report pointedly remarked, was to turn Czech
youths ‘into a race of slaves which the
Herrenvolk
system requires’.227
Heydrich pursued a similar policy line towards the universities. He
announced that the Czech University in Prague, which according to the
University Act of 1920 had assumed the sole legal succession of the
former Charles University and had been ‘temporarily’ closed after student
unrest in 1939 during which nine students had been shot and 1,200
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
arrested, would never reopen. Henceforth, the German University of
Prague, 73 per cent of whose academic staff consisted of Nazi Party
members, would be the only remaining university in Prague. ‘The oldest
university of the Reich’ should, Heydrich insisted, ‘not only maintain a
status worthy of its historical tradition’ but also serve as a ‘pathbreaking’
institution for a new form of academia that ‘infuses scholarship with the
völkisch
necessities’ of the New Age.228
In institutional terms, the university was to work closely with a new and
independent educational foundation, later called the Reinhard Heydrich
Foundation. The purpose of the foundation was to undertake research on
the ‘
völkisch
, cultural, political and economic conditions of Bohemia and
Moravia as well as the peoples in the Eastern and South-eastern European
region’.229 Overall, the Heydrich Foundation comprised eight institutes
occupying the buildings of the dissolved Czech University. The directors
of the institutes simultaneously served as professors at the German
Charles University so that a close link between the university and the
foundation could be guaranteed.230
The foundation was a key element of Heydrich’s long-term vision for
the Protectorate’s place in Nazi Germany’s academic landscape, which he
outlined to Bormann in May 1942. He flagged two principal political
tasks for future academic scholarship in the Protectorate: first, to conduct
research into the history of Bohemia and Moravia; and secondly, actively
to pursue scholarship on the re-Germanization of South-eastern Europe
more generally.231 In essence, the Reinhard Heydrich Foundation was to
conduct scientific studies that would facilitate the Germanization of the
region. With regard to the intended denationalization and depoliticiza-
tion of the population, so-called
tschechenkundliche
(Czechological) studies
were conducted in order to demonstrate the centuries-old positive
German influence on the region.232
But Heydrich’s cultural imperialism, aimed at undermining and eventu-
ally eradicating Czech culture, was by no means limited to academia. It
was also to be applied to the field of architecture. When, on 4 December
1941, Albert Speer visited Heydrich in Prague in order to negotiate future
contingents of Czech slave labourers to be sent to the Old Reich, they also
discussed the architectural future of Prague. One of Heydrich’s aims was
to turn Prague into a thriving German city, the gateway of the New Nazi
Empire into the Balkans and the occupied East. After a two-hour sight-
seeing tour of the city, Heydrich and Speer contemplated a variety of
architectural plans for the post-war rebuilding of Prague as a German city,
including the construction of new German university buildings and a
German opera house as well as a new German government complex
around the castle. Furthermore, the city was to be encircled by a major
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269
ring road that would link up with the German autobahn system. In archi-
tectural matters, too, Speer found Heydrich to be refreshingly straight
forward:
There was no comparison with all those Gauleiters, who indulged in
their hobby-horses, plans that were technically or architecturally impos-
sible, perhaps an old dream from their youth or their wives’ fantasies,
which they obstinately stuck to . . . By contrast, Heydrich was uncom-
plicated. He had only a few objections to my suggestions, all of which
showed his sensible approach to the problem. If his objections were
impractical for technical reasons, he was prepared to be convinced of this
instantly.233
While he attempted to undermine and eventually eradicate Czech
culture and national identity, Heydrich emerged as a patron of German
arts. Particularly in the field of music, he energetically pushed for cultural
Germanization. Under the aegis of Heydrich, Prague celebrated the 150th
anniversary of Mozart’s death on 5 December 1941 with considerable
pomp – including the renaming of Smetana Square as Mozart Platz, a
number of elaborate Mozart exhibitions and guest performances by the
Vienna State Opera.234 Heydrich also planned the establishment of a
permanent opera in Prague in 1943–4, a plan supported by Goebbels but
which, despite personal discussions between Heydrich and the Reich
Finance Minister, had to be postponed for war-related reasons.235
In October 1941, Heydrich became patron of the German Philharmonic
Orchestra and reopened the German Concert Hall in Prague, the
Rudolfinum, founded in the nineteenth century, but converted into the
Czech Chamber of Deputies after the Great War. At the festive opening
of the newly renovated Rudolfinum on 16 October, to which Heydrich
had invited the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to perform Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, he reiterated his firm conviction that culture and poli-
tics were inseparably intertwined, a point he sought to underline by
pointing to the history of the Rudolfinum itself. Heydrich recalled that
Anton Bruckner had played the organ here, but noted sadly that after
1918 musical life had become ‘Czechified’ and had therefore ‘degenerated’.
After twenty years of darkness, the Rudolfinum was now once more a ‘site
of German art’.236
The opening of the Rudolfinum gave Heydrich an opportunity to
reflect on his cultural policies in the Protectorate. After urging those
engaged in cultural work ‘always to act as German artists in the spirit of
the Reich’, he pledged that, as a professed admirer of the arts, he would
provide German artists with all ‘the inspirational and material conditions
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
they need for their work’. He then reminded his audience of the close
interconnection between ‘art and politics, race and character’ and
the particular relevance of the arts for ‘the soul and the heart of our
people’. ‘Historical periods of true greatness and true inner meaning’, he
observed, ‘have always prompted a flourishing of true art and genuine
ability.’ Times of ‘cultural and ideological decline’, on the other hand, were
historical periods in which Jewry thrived. It was the Jews, Heydrich
insisted, who had ‘injected the Czech people with the madness of inde-
pendent statehood and made it blind to . . . their self-evident belonging to
the Reich’.237
Heydrich also wanted to start a new cultural tradition by establishing
Prague’s ‘Cultural Week’ as ‘a festive manifestation of German power’.
This was to be a week-long display of German cultural achievements,
particularly in the field of music, which he considered a source of spiritual
recreation ‘in great times of struggle’. He firmly believed that such
a display of cultural superiority, coupled with the political message of
abandoning Slavic influences in the Protectorate, would have ‘the greatest
impact on the Slav; it testifies to our power and culture and eases
the integration of the racially desired part of the [Czech] population’.238
As patron of the festival, Heydrich opened the first concert on 15 May
1942: Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony performed by the German
Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague and their head conductor Joseph
Keilberth, with whom Heydrich occasionally played ‘house music’ in
his country mansion. Shortly thereafter, he and Lina attended a concert
given by the famous Leipzig Thomaner-Choir, during which the
choirboys, much to their delight, sang Bach’s motets in Hitler Youth
uniforms.239
On the evening of 26 May 1942, the night before his assassination, an
event of special emotional relevance to Heydrich was staged in the
Wallenstein Palace: a violin concerto composed by Heydrich’s father,
Bruno. As a special tribute to his father – whom he had treated
rather disdainfully and unsympathetically between 1931 and his death in
1938 – he had engaged a quartet of former employees of the Halle
Conservatory who played those pieces from Bruno’s opera
Amen
that
celebrated its hero figure, Reinhard. One of the opera’s more memorable
pieces, ‘Reinhard’s Crime’, was wisely omitted by the musicians. Visibly
touched by the event, Heydrich displayed his softer side: he invited the
Oberlandräte
and several senior civil servants and their wives to join him
for a surprise banquet at the fashionable Hotel Avalon where he greeted
his guests with unusual friendliness, kissing the ladies’ hands and presenting
himself as a ‘master of etiquette, entertaining, interested in everyone, a
charming conversationalist’.240
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271
The Rise of Resistance
The winter of 1941–2 marked the end of the German Blitzkrieg strategy
in the East, the United States’ entry into the war and a general rise in
resistance activity in the occupied territories. At this point, Heydrich was
forced to acknowledge that the realization of his Germanization goals had
receded into the distant future. As he admitted in a report to Hitler in
mid-May 1942, the situation in the Protectorate had ‘stiffened’ as a result
of recent reductions in rations, British air strikes against Pilsen and the
infiltration of a growing number of enemy agents. He also conceded that
the ‘military successes of the Reich’ were viewed ‘with scepticism’ by the
Czech population, but assured the Führer that there was no cause for
serious concerns, adding that he was merely waiting for an ‘appropriate
moment to strike swiftly, thus underscoring the fact that the Reich is still
able to strike and that my clemency is not a sign of weakness’.241