Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (39 page)

_______________

1
Linda Schmittroth and Mary Kay Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust,
Vol. 1: A-J (Detroit: Gale, 1998).

2
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:181.

3
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:181.

4
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:181.

5
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:181.

6
Paul Roland,
The Illustrated History of the Nazis
(Edison: Chartwell Books, 2009), 65.

7
Richard J. Evans,
The Coming of the Third Reich
(New York: The Penguin Press 2004), 191.

8
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:182.

9
James M. Rhodes,
The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution
(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980),123.

10
Rhodes,
The Hitler Movement
, 123.

11
Rhodes,
The Hitler Movement
, 123.

12
Oswald Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
(New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1940), 44.

13
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:183.

14
Roland,
The Illustrated History of the Nazis
, 55.

15
Rhodes,
The Hitler Movement
, 123.

16
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:183.

17
Richard Overy,
Goering: Hitler’s Iron Knight
(New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984), 127–128.

18
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 55.

19
Overy,
Goering: Hitler’s Iron Knight
, 127–128.

20
Overy,
Goering: Hitler’s Iron Knight
, 128.

21
Eric Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 511.

22
Evans,
The Coming of the Third Reich
, 191.

23
Evans,
The Coming of the Third Reich
, 191.

24
Stewart W. Herman,
It’s Your Souls We Want
(New York: Harper, 1943), 57.

25
Henri Lichtenberger,
The Third Reich
, trans. and ed. Koppel S. Pinson (New York: Greystone Press, 1937), 210.

26
Bruce Walker,
The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity
(Denver: Outskirts Press, 2008), 17.

27
Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel,
Goering
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 137.

28
Lichtenberger,
The Third Reich
, 211.

29
Lichtenberger,
The Third Reich
, 212.

30
Anna Reid,
Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944
(New York: Walker and Company, 2011), 23.

31
Reid,
Leningrad
, 20.

32
Reid,
Leningrad
, 20–22.

33
Reid,
Leningrad
, 22.

34
Reid,
Leningrad
, 22.

35
Reid,
Leningrad
, 24.

36
Roland,
The Illustrated History of the Nazis
, 197.

Reinhard Heydrich:
Fervent anti-Christian and Holocaust mastermind

INTRODUCTION

R
einhard Tristan Ergen Heydrich (March 7, 1904 – June 5, 1942) was the head of the SD (
Sicherheitsdienst
, or Hitler’s so called security police) and deputy to SS leader Heinrich Himmler. He also was the chief organizer of Nazi Germany’s plan to murder all European Jews.
¹
In short, Heydrich was the “true architect and brain behind the concept of the future SS state.”
²
He was also “the Generalissimo of the racial war” against the Jews and the “extensions of international Jewry,” which he considered to have occurred in the Soviet Union. For this reason, Heydrich concluded that by “conquering the Soviet Union, he would be striking a decisive blow at the worldwide conspiracy of Judeo-Bolshevism.”
³

HIS EARLY LIFE

A shy, unhappy child, his parents were cultured musicians and Heydrich appreciated music his entire life. Although reared as a devout Catholic, he grew up in a fiercely anti-Semitic home, a contradiction that he never openly dealt with. Eventually, his religion became Nazism, and he evolved into an active virulent anti-Catholic.

A very bright youth, Heydrich did exceptionally well in school and also excelled as an athlete. His family, though, as a result of their losses after the First World War, could no longer afford to send Heydrich to college. Like many Germans, Heydrich’s family lost most of their fortune after the war. Many otherwise rational Germans blamed the Jews for their economic losses due to the unfounded theory that the Jews were somehow “trying to take over the world” by causing Germany to lose the war.

Consequently, to obtain an education, the embittered young Heydrich became a German naval cadet. Although he advanced quickly, becoming a second lieutenant in 1926, he proved unpopular with some, allegedly because of his arrogant attitude. He eventually was expelled from the German navy for “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” because, among other offences, he was accused of getting the daughter of a shipyard director pregnant and refusing to marry her.

HEYDRICH BECOMES A NAZI

Heydrich joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and his fortunes soon changed. That same year, Heydrich married nineteen-year-old Lina von Osten, who was also a doctrinaire anti-Semite.
⁴
Heydrich was described as a man of “Luciferian coldness” with an insatiable greed for power, who “shared a conscious awareness of the omnipotence of man” in government.
⁵
Fest noted in his chapter on Heydrich that this “epitome of a Nazi” was at the “core” of National Socialism, a movement whose foundational belief, as well as that of the Third Reich government, was

the idea of race. Whatever aspect of ideology or practical policy was uppermost at any given moment—whether nationalist, socialist, monarchist or other tendencies—it only served to a greater or lesser degree to distract attention from the all-powerful racial doctrine. It has rightly been pointed out that “the doctrine of the racial enemy is as essential to National Socialism as the doctrine of the class enemy is to Bolshevism.” It welded together old emotions and prejudices which had been given a pseudo-scientific veneer during the nineteenth century.… In itself, the mythological exaltation of their own race above the so-called lower or opposed races served the tactical purpose of increasing the masses’ self-confidence and mobilizing their will to violence.
⁶

Under Heydrich and Himmler, Germany became a police state. Heydrich’s success in achieving this goal helped to skyrocket his career. He became an SD Major (
Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS
, or
SD
, was the intelligence agency of the SS in Nazi Germany) by the end of 1931 and, in 1932, was promoted to SD Colonel with complete control of the SD intelligence service. The following year, before he was even thirty, he was appointed SD Brigadier General.
⁷

Heydrich rapidly built the SD intelligence service into a massive network designed to spy on Hitler’s opponents, especially those in the Nazi Party whose loyalty was questionable. Ever aware of the importance of new technology, Heydrich used secret cameras and hidden microphones to document any potential opposition to Hitler. He then rapidly collected an enormous amount of information on party members and others.

This information was used to achieve a purge that began in 1933 when Heydrich assisted Himmler in carrying out the large-scale arrest of Nazi opponents, including religious leaders and all of those who had openly spoken out against Hitler. Soon German prisons were filled to capacity with those Heydrich had entrapped, forcing the construction of concentration camps to hold the growing overflow.

HEYDRICH’S MILITANT ANTI-CATHOLIC CRUSADE

Although a baptized Catholic, Heydrich left his faith as he became more involved in Nazism. For Heydrich, the enemies of the Nazi state were “all equally dangerous, whether Jew, Freemason or political Churchman.”
⁸
Historian Mario Dederichs described Heydrich’s anti-Catholicism as a “cold hatred” which “assumed at times paranoid features.”
⁹
Historian John S. Conway wrote that

Heydrich’s hatred of the churches…bordered on the pathological.… Blinded by an apostate’s hatred, his evaluation of the church situation was always so biased and his suggestion so radical, that even Hitler, perhaps for tactical reasons, was obliged to restrain his subordinate.
¹⁰