Titans of History (67 page)

The outbreak of war in 1939 saw Himmler appointed commissioner
for the consolidation of the German race, charged with eliminating “inferior” people from the Reich, and he set about expanding his concentration camps to detain opponents, Slavs and Jews. In September, Reinhard Heydrich—his talented protégé, head of both the SD intelligence service and Gestapo—ordered the forcible eviction of Jews from across the Reich into ghettos in Poland, where thousands were executed, starved or died from disease.

Tall, slim, athletic, blue-eyed and blond, though with broad feminine hips, Heydrich became Himmler's chief organizer of the secret but colossal slaughter of Europe's Jews. He specialized in clandestine intrigues, running a brothel to bug well-known patrons and using concentration-camp prisoners, murdered with injections, to provide the pretext for Hitler's invasion of Poland.

Heydrich was born of musical parents in the city of Halle, near Leipzig, in 1904. His father was a Wagnerian opera singer and the respected headmaster of the Halle Musical Conservatory while his mother, who was extremely strict and regularly beat her son, was a talented pianist. Young Heydrich was never popular among his peers, who nicknamed him Moses because of (untrue) rumors that he had Jewish ancestry.

Deeply sensitive about these rumors, in his teens Heydrich came to believe in the supposed inherent superiority of the Germanic people, but he was totally uninvolved in politics until a social-professional scandal ended his naval career. After the First World War, Heydrich joined the navy where the ambitious but sensitive officer who played violin beautifully was teased for his supposed Jewish origins. He had just become engaged to Lina Von Osten when he was cashiered from the navy for a simultaneous sexual relationship with another woman. In 1931, at age twenty-seven, he joined the SS, impressing Heinrich Himmler during his interview with his knowledge of secret police techniques derived from his obsessional reading of American detective novels and
police procedures. In 1933 he was promoted to brigadier general and given the responsibility of setting up the SD, the SS security service, where he identified the administrative talents of Adolf Eichmann, who became the Jewish expert of the SS.

In 1939 Heydrich was put in charge of the Reich Main Security Office, and after the invasion of Poland formed five SS
Einsatzgruppen
(task forces) to murder in cold blood—and bury in mass graves—political enemies, dissidents, aristocrats and Jews in the occupied territory.

Himmler now proposed plans—put together with Heydrich—to Hitler to rid Europe of all Jews through “forced evacuation to the east”—their euphemism for physical extermination—the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” Hitler approved. In June 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler—delegated to carry out “special tasks”—dispatched his SS
Einsatzgruppen
, who murdered 1,300,000 Jews, Gypsies and communists. Himmler and Heydrich personally toured the areas behind the front, encouraging and organizing more murders of men, but also increasingly women and children. Himmler himself personally witnessed executions, and when, in August 1941, brains from one of the victims spattered his SS uniform, he demanded that concentration camps be equipped with gas chambers as a more efficient way of killing, more humane for the executioner.

On January 20, 1942 Heydrich convened a meeting of the fifteen leading Nazi bureaucrats, many of them lawyers and eight of them possessing doctorates, in a large house in an affluent suburb of Berlin, near a picturesque lake called the Wannsee.

Over a million Jews had already been murdered by the mobile
Einsatzgruppen
, but the work was considered too slow and demoralizing. The purpose at Wannsee was to convey directives from the Führer regarding the final solution of the Jewish question and create an administrative and legalistic framework for mass
murder. “Europe was to be combed of Jews from east to west,” and those present were charged with the capture, transportation and industrial extermination of the estimated 11 million European Jews.

“Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East,” said Heydrich. The notes, kept by Adolf Eichmann, carefully avoid direct reference to extermination but “evacuation” was the accepted euphemism for slaughter, as Heydrich made clear:

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival
.

Numerous such camps—including Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Treblinka—were hastily constructed. Bergen-Belsen held over 60,000 Jews, of whom over 35,000 died of starvation, overwork, disease and medical experiments. Dachau—built in March 1933 to house political prisoners—served as a labor camp and center for horrific medical experiments, those too sick to work being summarily executed or sent to the nearby Hartheim killing center. Meanwhile, 3 million Russian prisoners of war were deliberately starved to death on Hitler/Himmler's orders.

Most notorious of the death camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau, established by Himmler in May 1940, and by 1942 equipped with seven gas chambers in which an estimated 2.5 million were
murdered, roughly 2 million of whom were Jews, Poles, Gypsies and Soviet POWs. Only about 200,000 people survived, the rest cremated or piled into mass graves.

Himmler and Heydrich had very different styles: Himmler considered himself a soldier, but his real gift was as a bureaucratic intriguer and Hitlerite courtier. He devoted much time to devising pedantic and preposterous rules for his new SS order. Himmler spent his rare leisure with his assistant, who became his mistress. Heydrich was a gifted sportsman and musician. In between his many duties, he trained as a pilot, flying daring missions in Norway and Russia, where he crashed and had to be rescued. He had many love affairs and sexual adventures. He was chilling but never banal. Himmler was terrifying but always blandly pedantic.

In addition to his already vast responsibilities, in September 1941 Heydrich was appointed
Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia and Moravia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia), where he instituted repressive measures and became known as
Der Henker
(the Hangman). On May 27, 1942, as he rode without an escort in an open-top green Mercedes, he was ambushed by two British-trained Free Czech fighters and died later of his wounds. In retaliation, the Nazis wiped out the entire Czech village of Lidice.

In June 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of 100,000 Jews from France and approved plans to move 30 million Slavs from eastern Europe to Siberia. The following month he ordered the “total cleansing” of Jews from the Polish General Government—6000 a day from Warsaw alone were transported to the death camps.

In 1943, Himmler was appointed minister of the interior. The following year Hitler disbanded the military intelligence service (the
Abwehr
) and made Himmler's SD Nazi Germany's sole intelligence service. In 1944, as the Allies advanced from the west,
Himmler failed completely as military commander of Army Group Vistula.

Recognizing defeat was inevitable, Himmler desperately attempted to destroy evidence of the death camps, then attempted to seek peace with Britain and America. Hitler ordered his arrest. Himmler fled in disguise but was arrested in Bremen, after which he swallowed a cyanide capsule.

A chinless, bespectacled ex-chicken-farmer who suffered from nervous ailments, he built a second family with his mistress, the ex-secretary whom he called Bunny—but the attic of their house contained furniture and books made from the bones and skins of his Jewish victims. He was a meticulous administrator who organized the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews (two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe), 3 million Russians, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 750,000 Slavs, 500,000 Gypsies, 100,000 of the mentally ill, 100,000 Freemasons, 15,000 homosexuals and 5000 Jehovah's Witnesses—murder on a scale never before imagined.

1902–89

I shall kick their teeth in. I am appointing the government. I am appointing the government by the support of this nation!

The Grand Ayatollah Khomeini led the 1979 revolution that overthrew the last shah of Iran and became the supreme leader of a theocracy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, that has become an
often disruptive power across the Near East. This aged, white-bearded Shiite cleric proved to be a dynamic, shrewd and unforgiving revolutionary leader who created a totally new system with his own power protected in a constitution that has proved surprisingly enduring, thanks to the brutal suppression of any opposition. Today's resurgent, bold Iran, pursuing a nuclear arsenal and regional hegemony, threatening war against the “Great Satan” America and annihilation of the “Little Satan” Israel, backing the Hamas and Hezbollah militias in Gaza and Lebanon, murdering and terrorizing its own people, is the Iran of Khomeini.

Khomeini, whose family had spent much time in India under the British Raj and who used the
nom de plume
Hindi for some of his own poetry, studied the Koran and in particular Iran's Twelver Shiism at madrassas in Arak and the holy city of Qom. The Iranian clergy were challenged and almost broken by the rule of Reza Shah, who made himself king of Iran during the 1920s, in a campaign to modernize and secularize the country like his hero Ataturk had done in Turkey.

Reza Shah was forced to abdicate the throne to his young son Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who at first proved adept at managing the powerful Shiite ayatollahs. Khomeini, not yet a cleric of the top rank, still accepted the idea of a limited constitutional monarchy but gradually he became repulsed by the secular and modernizing instincts of the new shah.

Khomeini was already in his sixties when the deaths of the leading ayatollahs enabled him to emerge as a clerical leader. In 1963, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi announced his White Revolution, a revolution of land ownership, liberation and education of women, and modernization imposed from above by the monarch himself. It was anathema to Khomeini who, calling a meeting of the top
ulema
(clergy), denounced the shah, whom he called a “wretched
miserable man,” a decadent tyrant like Muawiya's son, Caliph Yazid of history.

The shah responded by attacking the clergy in Qom itself. As the tension rose, Khomeini was arrested. When the Shah's prime minister demanded Khomeini apologize, supposedly slapping the cleric's face, Khomeini refused. He was already in contact with an expanding network of Islamic schools and charities with political and violent programs: days later the shah's prime minister was assassinated. Vast crowds protested against the shah and backed the ayatollahs.

In the face of this rising tension the shah gave his new prime minister powers to use the military to repress the rebellion. Four hundred protesters were shot by the army and the shah regained the initiative. Khomeini was forced into exile, for a period in Turkey but mainly in Najab in Iraq, the only other country with a huge Shiite population.

The shah had now emerged as a regional military potentate, a trusted ally of America and recipient of billions of dollars as the oil prices rose. But his White Revolution was gradually destroying itself: thousands of Iranians embraced the new possibilities of education, joining the middle class just as millions of poor Iranians, excited by new industry, new education, new housing, new wealth, had left their villages for Teheran only to discover a new listless poverty and disappointment in slums. Here they were left adrift under the corrupt and distant magnificence of the increasingly autocratic shah and his court of technocrats and cronies, a rule enforced by increasingly bombastic splendor and the regime's brutal SAVAK secret police. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq frequently suggested to the shah that he liquidate Khomeini but the shah always demurred.

Meanwhile in Najab and later in French exile near Paris, Khomeini recorded cassettes of his preaching that were smuggled into Iran
where they found a growing audience. He had embraced his new concept of divine sovereignty—
veleyet e faqih
—the guardianship of the religious expert over the people. Traditionally the Shia believed that the leadership of the Prophet descended through his direct descendants—the Twelve Imams—until the last, the twelfth, who had vanished but would one day return to lead them. Khomeini was now increasingly revered as “the Imam,” more than just an ayatollah, but a mystical national-religious leader in his own right.

In 1978, the shah's regime was paralyzed by a series of strikes and growing protests just as the inept President Jimmy Carter weakened his regime by criticizing its human rights abuses. The shah proved curiously incapable of reacting, turning to the US and British ambassadors but refusing to empower a military strongman to repress the growing tide of protest. Few knew that the shah, having concentrated all power in his own hands, was secretly suffering from cancer.

Meanwhile Khomeini proved himself an adept manipulator of Iranian and Western opinion, concealing his theocratic views while posing as a democratic populist, surrounding himself with democrats and Westernized liberals who convinced foreigners that he would oversee a new, free Iran. In fact his cassettes were open in their fanatical and violent language against the shah, America and Jews. When the shah left Iran “on vacation,” millions celebrated. On February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned and overthrew the provisional government—“I shall kick their teeth in; I appoint the government,” he declared—and appointed his own new government under a moderate democrat, Mehdi Barzagan: “he shall be obeyed because I appointed God's government.” In the absence of the Twelfth Imam, Khomeini immediately assumed near absolute powers, overseeing a terror that executed or murdered thousands of the shah's supporters and soon any of his own supporters who questioned his style of rule. His new constitution for an Islamic government was approved by a vast majority and while he created
a semi-democratic façade—with an elected president and parliament—the real power lay with himself, now the supreme leader, chosen by a committee of expert clergymen, who controlled the entire state. Swiftly the state became a far more ruthless, and repressive dictatorship than it had ever been under the hapless shah.