Hitler's Hangman (5 page)

nationalist enough. The great turning point of his early life came in spring

1931 when he was dismissed from military service as a result of a broken

engagement promise and his subsequent arrogant behaviour towards

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INTRODUCTION

the military court of honour. His dismissal at the height of the Great

Depression roughly coincided with his first meeting with his future wife,

Lina von Osten, who was already a committed Nazi and who convinced

him to apply for a staff position in Heinrich Himmler’s small but elite SS.

Until this moment, Heydrich’s life might have taken a very different

direction, and indeed he initial y possessed few obvious qualifications for

his subsequent role as head of the Gestapo and the SD. Crucial for his

future development were his experiences and personal encounters
within

the SS after 1931, and in particular his close relationship with Heinrich

Himmler. In other words, the most significant contributing factor to

Heydrich’s radicalization was his immersion in a political milieu of young

and often highly educated men who thrived on violent notions of cleansing

Germany from its supposed internal enemies while simultaneously

rejecting bourgeois norms of morality as weak, outdated and inappropriate

for securing Germany’s national rebirth.

Yet his immersion in this violent world of deeply committed political

extremists does not in itself explain why Heydrich emerged as arguably

the most radical figure within the Nazi leadership. At least one of the

reasons for his subsequent radicalism, it will be argued, lies in his lack of

early Nazi credentials. Heydrich’s earlier life contained some shortcom-

ings, most notably the persistent rumours about his Jewish ancestry that

led to a humiliating party investigation in 1932, and his relatively late

conversion to Nazism. To make up for these imperfections and impress his

superior, Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich transformed himself into a model

Nazi, adopting and further radicalizing key tenets of Himmler’s world-

view and SS ideals of manliness, sporting prowess and military bearing.

Heydrich even manipulated the story of his earlier life to shore up his

Nazi credentials. He supposedly fought in right-wing militant Freikorps

units after the Great War, but his involvement in post-1918 paramilitary

activity was at best minimal. Nor do any records exist to prove that he was

a member of the various anti-Semitic groups in Halle to which he later

claimed to have belonged.

By the mid-1930s, Heydrich had successful y reinvented himself as one

of the most radical proponents of Nazi ideology and its implementation

through rigid and increasingly extensive policies of persecution. The

realization of Hitler’s utopian society, so he firmly believed, required

the ruthless and violent exclusion of those elements deemed dangerous

to German society, a task that could best be carried out by the SS as the

executioner of Hitler’s wil . Only by cleansing German society of all

that was alien, sick and hostile could a new national community emerge

and the inevitable war against the Reich’s arch-enemy, the Soviet

Union, be won. The means of ‘cleansing’ envisaged by Heydrich were

I N T R O D U C T I O N

xix

to change dramatical y between 1933 and 1942, partly in response to

circumstances beyond his control and partly as a result of the increasing

Machbarkeitswahn
– fantasies of omnipotence – that gripped many senior

SS men, policy planners and demographic engineers after the outbreak

of the Second World War: the delusional idea that a unique historical

opportunity had arisen to fight, once and for al , Germany’s

real or imagined enemies inside and outside the Reich. While the mass

extermination of Jews seemed inconceivable even to Heydrich before

the outbreak of war in 1939, his views on the matter radicalized over the

fol owing two and a half years. A combination of wartime brutalization,

frustration over failed expulsion schemes, pressures from local German

administrators in the occupied East and an ideological y motivated deter-

mination to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ led to a situation in which he

perceived systematic mass murder to be both feasible and desirable.

The ‘solution of the Jewish question’ for which Heydrich bore direct

responsibility from the late 1930s was, however, only part of a much

broader wartime plan to recreate the entire ethnic make-up of Europe

through a massive project of expelling, resettling and murdering millions

of people in Eastern Europe after the Wehrmacht’s victory over the Soviet

Union. As Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia – a position

he held between September 1941 and his violent death in June 1942 –

Heydrich underlined his fundamental commitment to these plans by

initiating a uniquely ambitious programme of racial classification and

cultural imperialism in the Protectorate.

Despite his drive for the Germanization of East-Central Europe,

Heydrich was fully aware that its complete realization had to wait until

the Wehrmacht’s victory over the Red Army. It was simply impossible

from a logistical point of view to expel, resettle and murder an estimated

30 million Slavic people in the conquered East while simultaneously

fighting a war against a numerically superior alliance of enemies on the

battlefields. The destruction of Europe’s Jews, a much smaller and more

easily identifiable community, posed considerably fewer logistical prob-

lems. For Heydrich and Himmler, the swift implementation of the ‘final

solution’ also offered a major strategic advantage vis-à-vis rival agencies in

the occupied territories: by documenting their reliability in carrying out

Hitler’s genocidal orders, they recommended themselves to the Führer as

the natural agency to implement the even bigger post-war project of

Germanization.22

Heydrich’s life therefore offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and

organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of

which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly

specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the

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INTRODUCTION

emergence of the Nazi police state; the decision-making processes that

led to the Holocaust; the interconnections between anti-Jewish and

Germanization policies; and the different ways in which German occupa-

tion regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more personal

level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men

from perfectly ‘normal’ middle-class backgrounds can become political

extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian

fantasies of radically transforming the world.

C H A P T ER I

✦

Death in Prague

The 27th of May 1942 was a beautiful day. The morning dawned

bright and auspicious over the Bohemian lands, occupied by Nazi

Germany since 1939. After a long and exceptionally cold winter, spring

had finally arrived. The trees were in full blossom and the cafés of Prague

were buzzing with life. Some twenty kilometres north of the capital, in the

leafy gardens of his vast neo-classical country estate, the undisputed ruler

of the Czech lands and chief of the Nazi terror apparatus, Reinhard

Heydrich, was playing with his two young sons, Klaus and Heider, while

his wife, Lina, heavily pregnant with their fourth child, was watching from

the terrace, holding their infant daughter, Silke.1

Both privately and professionally, Heydrich had every reason to

be content. At the age of only thirty-eight, and as the second most

powerful man in the SS behind Heinrich Himmler, he had built a reputa-

tion as one of the most uncompromising executors of Hitler’s dystopian

fantasies for the future of the Reich and Nazi-occupied Europe. The

‘solution of the Jewish question’ in Europe, with which Heydrich had

been officially charged in January 1941, was making rapid progress: by

the spring of 1942, the Germans and their Eastern European accomplices

had murdered some 1.5 million Jews, predominantly through face-to-face

shootings. Many more would die in the killing factories in former

Poland where construction work for stationary gassing facilities had

begun the previous winter. Despite Germany’s recent declaration of

war on the United States, Heydrich’s future looked bright. On the Eastern

and North African fronts, the German army was rapidly advancing

and about to deal a number of devastating blows against the Allies.

Resistance activities, to be sure, had increased throughout Europe since

the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, but

Heydrich had good reason to be confident that these challenges to Nazi

rule would strengthen, rather than weaken, the influence of the SS on

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

German occupation policies, where Heydrich was widely considered to be

the rising star.

Contrary to his usual habit of driving to work shortly after dawn,

Heydrich left his country estate at around 10 o’clock that morning. His

driver, Johannes Klein, a man in his early thirties, was waiting for him in

the lobby, ready to take Heydrich to his office in Prague Castle, and, from

there, to the airport where Heydrich’s plane was to fly him to Berlin to

report to Hitler on the future governance of the Protectorate and to make

more general policy suggestions on the combating of resistance activities

throughout occupied Europe. As usual, they travelled the short distance to

Prague in a Mercedes convertible and without a police escort. As Klein

and Heydrich commenced their journey, neither of the two men could

know that some fifteen minutes down the road, in the suburb of Libeň,

three Czechoslovak agents from Britain were nervously waiting for them,

their guns and grenades carefully concealed under civilian clothing.2

Secret plans to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich had emerged in London

more than half a year earlier, in late September 1941. The origins of the

plan have remained highly controversial to this day and have given rise to

all sorts of conspiracy theories, largely because the parties involved – the

British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Czechoslovak

government-in-exile under President Edvard Beneš – officially denied all

responsibility for the assassination after 1945. Neither of them wanted to

be accused of condoning political assassination as a means of warfare,

particularly since it had always been clear that the Germans would

respond to the killing of a prominent Nazi leader with the most brutal

reprisals against the civilian population.3

The surviving documents on the assassination reveal that the plan to kill

Heydrich was primarily born out of desperation: ever since the fall of

France in the summer of 1940, and the inglorious retreat of the British

Expeditionary Forces from Dunkirk, the British authorities had been

struggling to regain the military initiative. With no chance of being able

to defeat the German army by themselves, the British hoped to incite

popular unrest in the Nazi-occupied territories, thereby deflecting vital

German military resources to a number of trouble spots. Hugh Dalton,

the Minister of Economic Warfare, talked about creating subversive

organizations behind enemy lines, while the War Office was emphatically

calling for ‘active efforts to combat the serious loss of confidence in the

British Empire which has arisen . . . following our recent disasters’.4

Neither Dalton nor anyone else in the British cabinet had a firm

grasp of the immense difficulties and deterrents facing the underground

organizations in Nazi-occupied Europe. Nor did they appreciate how

complicated it was to conduct small-scale sabotage operations. The

D E AT H I N P R AG U E

3

Czechs and Poles in exile in Putney and Kensington were more realistic.

They were unwilling to jeopardize their existing intelligence networks at

home by organizing ambitious mass uprisings that could only fail in the

face of an overwhelming German military presence. However, even when

measured against the generally low levels of resistance activity in early

1941, the Czechs were seen by the British to be particularly complacent.

As Beneš’s chief intelligence adviser, František Moravec, admitted after

the war, in terms of resistance activities in the occupied territories

‘Czechoslovakia was always at the bottom of the list. President Beneš

became very embarrassed by this fact. He told me that in his consultations