Hitler's Hangman (57 page)

Czech and German police organizations guarded railway lines. Heydrich

made it perfectly clear to the Protectorate government that he would

respond ‘drastically’ to all future acts of sabotage against railway lines or

telecommunications facilities and that he would make the entire popula-

tion of the affected area ‘liable with their heads’.39

The arrests which fol owed Heydrich’s arrival did not spare the

Protectorate government, long regarded by the Gestapo as a nest of traitors

and spies for the British. Heydrich’s lesson to the Czechs began at the top

with the arrest of the Prime Minister, Alois Eliáš, who had indeed served

as ÚVOD’s principal contact in the Protectorate government. Heydrich

had known of Eliáš’s communications with the underground movement for

some time, but Hitler had decided that ‘the reckoning with the resistance

movement and the compromised Czech leaders’ would have to wait until

after Germany’s immininent victory in the war against the Soviet Union.40

Eliáš’s arrest was one of the most visible indicators of a radical reversal

of German occupation policy under Heydrich. The German People’s

Court, hastily summoned from Berlin to Prague, wasted little time in

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229

sentencing him and Prague’s mayor, Otakar Klapka, to death. Heydrich

proudly reported to Bormann that he had staged a ‘fair’ trial and had

forced Eliáš to sign a declaration condemning resistance activities. More

importantly, Eliáš’s declaration, published on the front pages of the

collaborationist press throughout the Protectorate, culminated in an

unlikely rejection of Czech claims to an independent state and nation-

hood: ‘I think it is impossible for political, economic, and social reasons

that our small people of 7½ million, surrounded by German living space,

will ever be able to exist as an independent state.’41

After the trial, president Hácha pleaded with Heydrich to spare Eliáš’s

life. Heydrich rejected this request and repeatedly urged Hitler to have

Eliáš executed as soon as possible. Hitler decided otherwise: for the time

being, Eliáš was to remain in prison as a hostage in order to keep Hácha

and the rest of the Czech government under control.42 With ÚVOD’s

leaders arrested and Eliáš a hostage, Hácha had two options: to resign in

protest or to remain in office, thereby acknowledging Heydrich’s terror

regime as legitimate. On the day of Eliáš’s arrest, Hácha prepared a letter

of resignation. Heydrich had anticipated Hácha’s move and met with him

in the afternoon of 28 September. Fearing that Hácha’s resignation would

further encourage the resistance, Heydrich professed to regret the repres-

sive measures he had been forced to introduce ‘with a bleeding heart’ and

assured the elderly President that Czech autonomy would remain

untouched.43 Hácha stayed in office and embarked on a policy of collabo-

ration designed to spare the Czech people further bloodshed. Driven by

the desire to prevent greater evil, on 4 December he denounced Beneš on

Prague radio, accusing the exiled President of stirring up trouble at a safe

distance with no thought of the consequences. Czechoslovak BBC broad-

casts from London responded by calling Hácha a traitor, to which the

beleaguered President replied: ‘Mr Beneš does not see, as I do, the tears of

the mothers and wives who address their desperate pleas to me because

their sons and husbands fell into disaster after having been seduced by

deceptive radio broadcasts. He is in a position to permit himself illusions,

to build castles in the air, and to paint alluring pictures of the future . . .

For us, there is no way but to face reality with resolution and to act soberly

in accordance with bare facts.’44 Heydrich was jubilant. The Protectorate

government, he remarked joyfully in a speech to Nazi leaders, had finally

burned all bridges between Prague and London.45

Heydrich’s emergency measures were aimed not only against the

Protectorate government and Czech underground, but also against black-

marketeers, who were officially held responsible for the food shortages

which plagued the Protectorate. Heydrich tried to capitalize on public

resentment of the black market to discredit the resistance. The under-

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ground and black-marketeers – the ‘hyenas of the home front’ – were

accordingly designated ‘enemies of the Czech people’. Of the 404 death

sentences handed down by the martial law courts in the first few months

of Heydrich’s rule, 169 were for alleged economic crimes. In pursuit of

illegal traders, Heyrich executed ethnic Germans as well as Czechs. This

apparent even-handedness concealed his real aim, which was to increase

Czech agricultural production for the Nazi war effort. The attack on the

black market was accompanied by a recount of grain and livestock, which

successfully relied on the impact of the terror to produce an accurate

return. Farmers were promised amnesty for past evasions, but faced death

or deportation for further cheating.46

Although paling in comparison to events in Poland, the speed and

viciousness of Heydrich’s new regime of terror and repression were

unprecedented in the history of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich

considered his terror measures to be unavoidable: as a Slav, ‘the Czech . . .

is more dangerous and must be handled differently’ from Aryan peoples.

‘The Nordic, Germanic man can be either convinced or broken – the

Czech, Slavic man is very difficult to convince . . . And the consequence of

this is that we must constantly keep our thumb on him so that he always

remains bent, so that he will obey us and co-operate.’47

In late October 1941, however, the first wave of terror officially subsided

for ‘optical reasons’. In order to give the outward impression of the

Protectorate’s complete pacification, the summary courts temporarily

ceased to impose death penalties, although the SS secretly continued

to carry out executions at Mauthausen concentration camp.48 On

29 November Heydrich went further in his propagandistic policy of

‘postive gestures’ by suspending the state of emergency in all regional

districts of the Protectorate with the exception of Prague and Brünn.

Between 30 November 1941 and 27 May 1942, Nazi authorities announced

only thirty-three executions. Still, as one London informant reported,

‘people [kept] clear of any public actions, associational life, discussions and

conversations, and the majority [avoided] relations altogether . . . [All

Czechs are] gritting their teeth.’49

Governing a State

Between 1939 and 1941, Heydrich was primarily concerned with policing

the newly conquered territories under German control rather than with

the problem of how they were to be governed. He had come to Prague as

a political novice, well versed in the in-fighting of competing Nazi agen-

cies, but with a merely theoretical knowledge of the challenges involved in

running an occupied territory.

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231

To be sure, the SS leadership more generally had given increasing

thought to the future of the German Empire after the invasion of the

Soviet Union. A 1941
Festschrift
for Heinrich Himmler, for example,

sheds some light on the possible future governance of the Nazi Empire.

The most intellectually sophisticated contribution to the volume was an

essay written by Heydrich’s former deputy Dr Werner Best, now in charge

of the civil administration of occupied France. Best proposed four ways of

administering the diverse territories of occupied Europe in accordance

with Nazi principles: one was what he called ‘co-operative’, with Denmark

being the best case study of a ‘racially valuable’ country run without much

interference from the Foreign Ministry. A second category was ‘supervi-

sory’. The examples here were France, Belgium and the Netherlands,

where German officials were currently working through the existing

national civil service, while maintaining a strong military presence. The

third was a ‘ruling’ occupation, as in the Protectorate of Bohemia and

Moravia, where the German reshaping of the local bureaucracy was much

greater and Nazi police agencies had to remain more watchful for threats

to German interests. Best’s fourth and final category was ‘colonial’: the

General Government and the territories further east served as key exam-

ples for communities where the ‘inferior’ civilization level of the inhabit-

ants required the occupiers to take up the burden of government for the

sake of ‘order and health’.50

From Heydrich’s point of view, Best’s proposals had two serious flaws.

First, by arguing that some non-Germans should essentially be allowed to

police themselves, it gave the SS – the key agency concerned with policing

and security – no entry-point into Western Europe. This was something

with which Heydrich could most definitely not agree. Secondly, Best had

merely proposed a theoretical framework for German occupation regimes

after the war’s end and offered no advice on the actual running of the

Protectorate. Heydrich therefore had to improvise. The learning curve was

steep, but, characteristically, he immersed himself in his new task with

relentless energy, usually working more than fifteen hours a day and hiring

and firing three adjutants within his first week in Prague for being unable

to keep up with his demands.51

During his first three months in Prague, Lina hardly saw her husband,

who returned only infrequently to Berlin.52 Whatever precious time he

had left outside the office, he invested in sport, one of his great passions.

Even in Prague, he kept up his ambitious training schedule. In September

1941, he commenced training for an international sabre-fencing competi-

tion between Germany and its ally, Hungary, which took place in early

December. The Hungarian team, internationally dominant throughout the

1930s, was almost impossible to beat and the German team had been

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substantially weakened: the 1940 national champion, Georg Frass, had

fallen on the Eastern Front, and the leading German sabre fencer of the

time, Josef Losert, could not be released from the Russian campaign.

Heydrich volunteered to step into the breach. As expected the Hungarians

won the competition with great ease, but obviously had no desire to offend

the head of Nazi Germany’s terror apparatus: Heydrich won all three of

his bouts.53

Heydrich’s family life improved when, in early January 1942, Lina and

their children moved to Prague. As wife of the acting Reich Protector,

Lina could now live the kind of lifestyle she had always considered her

due. Food was more plentiful than in Berlin and she had an army of serv-

ants at her command, but she never warmed to the idea of living in Prague

Castle with its ornamental rooms and impersonal furnishings. After three

months, she grew tired of living in a ‘museum’ and urged Reinhard to find

her a more family-friendly home that offered more privacy. There was ‘too

much history’ surrounding her in Prague Castle, she complained.54

At Easter 1942, the Heydrich family moved to the luxurious manor

house of Jungfern-Breschan (Panenské Břežany), some twenty kilometres

north of the capital. The white neo-classical mansion had thirty rooms

and was surrounded by a seven-hectare garden, leading to 125 hectares of

dense, shady forest and a little village. The property had been confiscated

from its Jewish owner, the sugar manufacturer and renowned art collector

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, shortly after the German invasion. As the

summer residence of Heydrich’s predecessor in Prague, the building had

been completely redecorated and refurbished. When the Heydrichs

decided to use the house as their primary residence, central heating was

installed to allow the family to stay in the manor house during the winter,

and slave labourers from Theresienstadt concentration camp were brought

in to build a swimming pool in the garden. Lina was delighted with the

result and felt that Reinhard had finally provided his ‘princess’ with an

appropriate home.55

But Heydrich was rarely home. Apart from his commitment to sport,

his responsibilities as head of the Reich Security Main Office and his

co-ordination of the final solution, he was now involved in all matters of

governance in Prague: from increases in ministerial salaries of members of

the Protectorate government and the appointment of individual chairs at

the German University in Prague to the renovations and excavations at

Prague Castle, and the question of the political reliability of individual

engineers working at the Škoda factories.56