Reinhard Heydrich

File:Reinhard Heydrich-NARA.jpg

Reinhard Heydrich as SS-Gruppenführer.

Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (March 7, 1904, Halle – June 4, 1942, Prague) was an SS-obergruppenführer, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (which included the Gestapo, SD and Kripo Nazi police agencies) and Reich governor of Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler considered him a possible successor. He was nicknamed "The Butcher of Prague", "The Blond Beast" and "Der Henker" (German for the hangman).

Heydrich was one of the architects of the Holocaust, chairing the 1942 Wannsee conference, which laid out the plans for the extermination of all European Jews. Heydrich was wounded by British-trained Czechoslovakian partisans in Prague during an assassination attempt named Operation Anthropoid. He would later die from these wounds.

Name

Heydrich was named after either the main character in an opera or figures of history. "Reinhard" comes from one of his father's own operas, in a portion called - ironically enough - "Reinhard's Crime". His first middle name, Tristan, is from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. It is possible that the second middle name is based on Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose name in German is Eugen. (The Nazi cruiser Prinz Eugen was also named for Eugene of Savoy.)

Early life

Heydrich was born in Halle an der Saale to Richard Bruno Heydrich and Elisabeth Anna Maria Amalia Kranz. His father and mother were both very heavily musically involved (his father was a composer), and Heydrich developed a passion for the violin, which was to continue throughout his life. Although a very shy boy he excelled physically and grew up to be handsome and fit. He was an impressive athlete, excelling in fencing and swimming.

It was later widely rumoured that Heydrich was of Jewish extraction. It is said that Adolf Hitler himself was aware of the rumour at the very least and that Himmler had definite proof of the allegation. Some sources claim that one of his great-grandparents was Jewish and others go further saying that it was actually one his grandparents - making Heydrich himself a 2nd degree Mischling according to the Nuremberg laws passed by the Nazi Party in 1935. Given Heydrich's role in the Holocaust this rumour would, if true, provide one of history's most tragic ironies.

In 1922 Heydrich joined the navy; however, he was later dismissed, quite why has never been satisfactorily explained. Heydrich's own bizarre version is that he impregnated and then refused to marry a young woman whose father was an important industrialist, a major naval contractor and a personal friend of Erich Raeder, the naval Commander-in-Chief. The woman revealed her difficulties to the mysterious industrialist who then took his woes to Raeder. The Admiral promptly summoned Heydrich to his office where he and the aggrieved father joined in demanding that Heydrich marry the girl, only to be told that he had already become engaged to another girl, his future wife Lina von Osten and considered himself bound by his "honour as a naval officer" not to dissolve the engagement. At this, reeling with revulsion, Raeder is alleged to have summarily and dishonourably cashiered Heydrich. The tale is clearly false: relentless post-war efforts by journalists to identify the supposedly socially prominent young woman came to nothing and Raeder himself scoffed at it while, intriguingly, refusing to disclose his reasons for sacking Heydrich.

This leaves the question as to why Heydrich would have concocted a tale which clearly discredited him, and why would Lina Heydrich and other purveyors of this nonsense also maintain that Heydrich was contemptuous of the Nazis before his dismissal from the navy, which others of his acquaintance at the time categorically deny. One theory was submitted by Edouard Calic, namely that Heydrich was discharged once it emerged that he had been spying on the navy in the service of the Nazis. While Heydrich's lifelong radical-rightism and fascination with espionage would make this feasible and would explain why SS head Heinrich Himmler appointed him to head the SD immediately following his discharge, direct evidence is lacking. Yet another version also involving sexual voracity is that Heydrich had several affairs with a number of brother officers' wives, rather than a "relatively wholesome" single relationship with an unmarried woman. Again conclusive evidence is unavailable.

Family

In December 1930 Heydrich met 19-year-old Lina von Osten (June 14, 1911 - August 14, 1985) in Kiel. She was the daughter of Jürgen von Osten who was from minor northern German aristocracy. Although Heydrich was already engaged to another girl by that time, he proposed to Lina and they got married on December 26, 1931 in Großenbrode. Together they had four children:

• Klaus Heydrich (born June 17, 1933), lost his life in a traffic accident in Jungfern-Breschan on October 24, 1943
• Heider Heydrich (born December 28, 1934)
• Silke Heydrich (born April 9, 1939)
• Marte Heydrich (born July 23, 1942)

Upon Heydrich's death in June 1942, Lina Heydrich was eighth months pregnant. She gave birth to hers and Reinhard's fourth and final child, a daughter named Marte, in the early morning hours of July 23, 1942.

Nazi Party and the SS

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Heydrich seen wearing his Totenkopfring and the Luftwaffe Pilot's Badge.

In 1931, Himmler began to set up a counter-intelligence division of the SS. Acting on a friend's advice, he interviewed Heydrich, and, it is alleged, after a twenty minute test whereby Heydrich had to outline plans for the new division, Himmler hired him on the spot. In doing so Himmler also effectively recruited Heydrich into the Nazi Party. He would later receive a Totenkopfring from Himmler, for his service.

At this time, he was relatively insignificant within the Nazi intelligence apparatus. He and his staff spent their time building up a card-file system on all persons who were considered a threat to the Party, often including party officials themselves. Heydrich supported his family on a meagre salary and worked in a tiny office.

American journalist John Gunther, during his trip to Germany in 1934, while collecting research materials for his famed book "Inside Europe", showed considerable knowledge of Nazi intrigues and backgrounds when he said Himmler actually had a relatively delicate tolerance for butchery compared to a man like Heydrich, who was far more cruel. At this time, the latter was regarded as an obscure and bureaucratic medium-ranked officer.

In July 1932, Heydrich took on the leadership of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), an ideologically saturated intelligence organisation wholly committed to the defence of Nazism. He built it by recruiting a number of amateurish, if ideologically committed, agents, with whom reports could be compiled on various aspects of life in Nazi Germany. The organisation further benefitted from close cooperation with the Gestapo, which Heydrich was also handed control of in 1936, as part of a combined security police force. Later he became the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), of which the SD and the Gestapo were sections.

While Heydrich's abilities were never doubted by superiors and subbordinates alike his constant sarcasm, occasionally boorish behaviour, extreme oversensitivity to being underestimated (in contrast to Himmler who, more rationally, preferred to be underestimated by would-be opponents) and aggressiveness won him few loyalists, while his propensity for rash actions like going so far as to arrest a Kreisleiter in 1935, or telling Göring and the council of ministers in 1940 that the security police would exercise limitless powers whether they granted them or not, was an ever present danger for Himmler who had to clean up the messes. Himmler would occasionally lose his patience with Heydrich berating and abusing him, sometimes calling him "Genghis Khan", but ultimately found him indispensable, though exasperating.

Upon the establishment of the Third Reich, Heydrich helped Adolf Hitler "dig up dirt" on many political opponents, keeping an impressive filing system listing individuals and organizations opposing the party and the regime. He is believed to be the creator of the forged documents of Russian correspondence with the German High Command. While it is now known that the Stalinist Great Purge of the Soviet military officer corps was at most tangentially related to this forgeries, at the time it was widely believed to have resulted from Heydrich's actions, enormously adding to his prestige. He was also instrumental in establishing the false 'attack' by Poland on German national radio at Gleiwitz, which was to prove the Nazi justification for the beginning of World War II, though this last antic was a pathetic failure that only came to light post-war when allied investigators began researching the captured German documents.

Heydrich was one of the main architects of the Holocaust during the first years of World War II. He had initially gained some control over Jewish policy, when in November 1938, Hermann Goering assigned him as head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration following Kristallnacht. From this position, he worked tirelessly both to coordinate various initiatives that were forwarded for the Final Solution, and to assert SS dominance over Jewish policy. Most famously in this respect, on January 20th 1942, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which plans for the deportation of the Jews to extermination camps were discussed.

Assassination in Prague

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Reinhard Heydrich (middle) together with Heinrich Himmler, Karl Wolff and an unidentified assistant at the Obersalzberg, May 1939.

For detailed information about the assassination see main article Operation Anthropoid.

On September 27, 1941 Heydrich was appointed acting Reichsprotektor in the Czech puppet state called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He replaced Konstantin von Neurath whom Hitler considered insufficiently harsh (but who remained titulary protector till 20 August 1943).

While virtual military governor of Bohemia and Moravia, exercising real executive power above the Czech President and Prime Minister, Heydrich often drove alone in a car with an open roof — a show of confidence in the occupation forces and the effectiveness of their repressive measures against the local population (See Czech resistance to Nazi occupation).

Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík were Czechoslovakian partisans who had fled the country earlier in 1941. After receiving training from the British they parachuted back into the region that December and on May 27, 1942 ambushed Heydrich while he rode in his open car in the Prague suburb of Kobylisy. Gabčík drew a concealed British-made Sten sub-machine gun but it failed to fire, so Kubiš threw a grenade near the car which wounded Heydrich.

Despite Himmler sending his best doctors, Heydrich died in agony in a Prague hospital at the age of 38. Although the exact cause of death has not been definitively established, the autopsy states that Heydrich's death was from septicemia caused by bacteria and toxins from horse-hair and upholstery fragments originating from the car seats and driven into his blood stream by the grenade fragments.

The Nazi retaliation was savage and a brutal warning against further armed resistance. About 13,000 people were arrested, some of them killed. On June 10 all males over the age of 16 in the village of Lidice, 22 km north-west of Prague, and another village, Ležáky, were murdered, a day after the town was burned.

A highly elaborate funeral was conducted for Heydrich in Prague and Berlin, with Hitler attending (and placing Heydrich's decorations on his funeral pillow, the highest grade of the German Order and the Blood Order Medal). Hitler himself perhaps best encapsulated Heydrich's general attitude in his acknowledgment that Heydrich was partly to blame for his own death through arrogance and a blasé attitude:

"Since it is opportunity which makes not only the thief but also the assassin, such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmoured vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the Fatherland not one whit. That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic."

Lina Heydrich later stated that she believed Heydrich had expected an early death, saying that she saw his frequent unnecessary risk-taking (such as his recklessness in his Luftwaffe Me 109) as an attempt to ensure that, should he die, his would be a dramatic death.

Heydrich was buried in Berlin's famed Invalidenfriedhof, which had the misfortune to be on the border between West and East Berlin. His plot was between those of two famous German war heroes, Oven and Scharnhorst. In 1945, however, his headstone and grave marker were removed by the Allies, who feared his tomb would become a rallying point for Neo-Nazis. During the time when the Berlin Wall was standing, the grave was part of the so-called "death strip" between the two Berlins and inaccessible to the public.

Heydrich's eventual replacements were Ernst Kaltenbrunner as the chief of RSHA, and Karl Hermann Frank 27 - 28 May 1942 and Kurt Daluege 28 May 1942 - 14 October 1943 as the new acting Reichsprotektors.

After Heydrich's death, the first three "trial" death camps were constructed and put into operation at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Belzec. The project was named Operation Reinhard in Heydrich's honor.

The Bioweapon Theory

Some experts on biological warfare (notably Dr. Paul Fildes of Porton Down who claimed to be involved) have alleged that the grenade which killed Heydrich contained purified botulinum toxin. There is circumstantial evidence to support this theory, but no conclusive proof. Certainly, the grenade used to attack Heydrich was definitely not of a standard type used by the Allies. A photograph taken by the Nazis of one of the unused grenades left at the scene shows a strangely customised Gammon grenade tightly wrapped with adhesive tape and appearing to cover an aluminium water canteen. Purification and concentration of botulinum toxin was well within the reach of British military scientists at Porton Down who had done considerable practical research on the topic. Furthermore, the symptoms that Heydrich suffered before his eventual death mystified doctors treating him and bore some similarities to those of botulinum poisoning. Botulinum neurotoxin is so powerful that (assuming the grenade contained it) even the most minor flesh-wound would have been sufficient to kill Heydrich. [2]

Possible Jewish ancestry

Since Heydrich's death, historical evidence has come to light that Heydrich may very well have had a Jewish grandparent and that this fact was known to high Nazi leaders including Hitler and Himmler. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 Jewishness was defined as any person with one Jewish grandparent. That would have classified Heydrich as "a person of mixed Jewish blood in the second degree", meaning he had one pure German and one half Jewish parent. As a "Mischling" (of mixed blood) Heydrich would, at the very least, have been subject to expulsion from the SS.

The most compelling evidence of Heydrich's Jewish ancestry is the testimony of Walter Schellenberg who stated, in the 1950s, that Heinrich Himmler had held a private meeting with Heydrich in 1935, after learning that one of Heydrich's relatives had held the surname of "Süss", a common Jewish name. According to Schellenberg, Heydrich admitted that one of his grandparents was Jewish and Himmler had reportedly informed Hitler. Hitler, however, stated Heydrich was a special case since "his Aryan blood far suppressed his Jewish heritage". Shortly thereafter, Gestapo personnel were dispatched to Halle, where Heydrich had been born, to erase certain records of Heydrich's past. Rumours arose that this included the destruction of tombstones, but this is unconfirmed.

It was not long before other Nazis had heard insinuations that Heydrich might have had a Jewish relative in his background. Dr. Achim Gercke, the Nazi Party's leading genealogist, was commissioned by Gregor Strasser to look into Heydrich's background after a Nazi official, Rudolf Jordan, revealed Heydrich's suspected Jewish grandfather to Party Headquarters in 1932. Gercke claimed that research showed that not only was the Süss in question, a locksmith, not even a Jew, but that he wasn't even Heydrich's genetic grandfather, whose name was Reinhold Heydrich. Also of note is that the investigation was concluded in the summer of 1932, rather than 1935.

The accuracy of both Schellenberg's and Gercke's testimonies are today still debated among historians. Some works on Heydrich have thus far dispelled the story as a rumour. The assertion is also routinely denied by neo-Nazis. However, it is believed by some that Heydrich did believe the claims at least enough to try and make up for it by even greater devotion to the Nazi cause. As a child, neigbhorhood kids teased him by calling him "Izzy," short for "Isidor," a name popularly associated with Jews. (In countries which only allowed Christian first names to be registered, Jews often used Isidore as an 'outside name' for Israel.) Heydrich was encouraged by his, obssesively antisemitic parents to react to this taunts with extreme violence. On one occasion his younger brother Heinz attacked one such taunter with a knife.

His younger brother's anti-nazism

Interestingly Reinhard Heydrich's younger brother Heinz, though initially as fanatical a Nazi as his brother, gradually became disenchanted with Nazism and even became involved in the obtainment of false Aryan documents for Jews. When his activities were uncovered by the Gestapo he was given the choice of committing suicide rather than face trial with the attendant hardships for his family (and embarrassment to the regime). He shot himself in December 1944.

Trivia

During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II, Prague Castle, resting place of the crown jewels of the Bohemian Kingdom, became the headquarters of Reinhard Heydrich, the "Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia". It is said that he placed the Bohemian crown on his head, believing himself to be a great king; old legends say that a usurper who places the crown on his head is doomed to die within a year. It was less than a year after assuming power that Heydrich was assassinated. Many consider the story apocryphal but it is commonly found in his biographies and included for completeness.

Summary of SS career

Dates of rank

• SS-Mann: 14 July 1931
• SS-Sturmführer: 10 August 1931
• SS-Sturmhauptführer: 1 December 1931
• SS-Sturmbannführer: 25 December 1931
• SS-Standartenführer: 29 July 1932
• SS-Oberführer: 21 March 1933
• SS-Brigadeführer: 9 November 1933
• SS-Gruppenführer: 30 June 1934
• SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei: 27 September 1941

Service history

• July 1931: Appointed as an SS member under SS Number 10120
• August 1931: Appointed as SS officer and tasked with forming the SS Security Service
• July 1932: Founded the Sicherheitsdienst
• June 1934: Appointed Commander of the Sicherheitspolizei
• September 1939: Founder and first Commander of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt
• September 1941: Appointed as Deputy Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia
• January 1942: Chairman of the Wannsee Conference
• May 1942: Attacked by British supported Czechoslovak partisans in Prague
• June 1942: Died from wounds received in partisan attack

Notable decorations

• German Order (Posthumous)
• Blood Order (Posthumous)
• Golden Nazi Party Badge
• Iron Cross Second (1940) and First (1941) Classes
• Luftwaffe Pilot's Badge (Flugzeugführerabzeichen)
• Luftwaffe Front Pilot Badge (Frontflugspange) in bronze (1940) and in silver (1941)
• Danzig Cross (First Class)
• Anschluss Medal
• Sudetenland Medal with Prague Castle Bar
• Memel Medal
• Olympic Games Decoration (First Class)
• Social Welfare Decoration (First Class)
• NSDAP Long Service Ribbon for 10 years service
• Police Service Ribbon for 18 years service

Additional service as fighter pilot

Reinhard Heydrich also served as Reserve Hauptmann, then Major in the Luftwaffe. Some sources claim, that he served in the Invasion of Poland as a bomber gunner, but this is not confirmed. Then, despite his advanced age, he completed a fighter pilot course in 1940, probably due to reasons of ambition. Heydrich wanted to set an example and show that the members of SS are not "asphalt" soldiers acting behind the front line, but a leading elite of the Third Reich. In April 1940 he flew a Bf 109 in the Fighter Group II./JG 77 "Herz As" in Norway. The planes flown by Heydrich had an ancient Germanic runic character S (Sieg = victory) painted on the side of the fuselage. On May 13 1940 he crashed his plane during take-off and was injured. For a short time in May he flew patrol flights over North Germany and the Netherlands. Then, after a new accident, he returned to Berlin. In mid-June 1941, before the German attack on the USSR, he resumed flying, ignoring Himmler's ban. He flew his personal plane Bf 109E-7 again with Group II./JG 77 from Baltsi on the southern Eastern Front, which put the wing commander under pressure due to Heydrich's position and lack of experience. On July 22 1941, his plane was badly damaged over Yampol by Soviet AA artillery. Heydrich managed to crash-land in no-man's land, and run back to the German lines. After this adventure he was forbidden to fly once again, as it was realized that Heydrich's capture as a POW would be a major security breach for Germany, and he never again returned to active flying.

Heydrich was too old and inexperienced for a fighter pilot and he lacked the necessary free time for training flights. But despite his lack of combat success, he was decorated with the Iron Cross Second (1940) and First (1941) Classes. The number of missions flown by Heydrich is not known, it is only recorded that he was shot down, but he was awarded the Frontflugspange (Front Pilot Badge) in silver, which usually was awarded after 60 successful combat missions.

Fiction

The events of the Wannsee conference are recreated in the 1984 TV Movie Wannseekonferenz (The Wannsee Conference)[3] directed by Heinz Schirk, and remade in 2001 under the title Conspiracy [4], with Kenneth Branagh playing Reinhard Heydrich. The Conference was also the subject of a 1992 English language documentary film entitled The Wannsee Conference directed by Dutch director Willy Lindwer [5].

The plan to kill Heydrich is central to the plot of the 1998 novel As Time Goes By, a sequel to the movie Casablanca, written by Michael Walsh. (ISBN 0-446-51900-6). The assassination itself has been dramatised in the 1943 Fritz Lang film Hangmen Also Die (written by Bertolt Brecht) [6], the 1964 Czechoslovak film Atentát [7] and the 1975 film Operation Daybreak, starring Anthony Andrews (Jozef Gabcik), Timothy Bottoms (Jan Kubis), Martin Shaw (Karel Curda) and Anton Diffring (Heydrich) [8].

Heydrich, as the "Reich's Crown Prince of Terror", plays a leading role in March Violets and The Pale Criminal, the first two novels in Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy (ISBN 0-14-023170-6), in which Bernie Gunther, a Berlin private eye in the tradition of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who left the Berlin police when the Nazis came to power, finds his investigations embroil him in the internal feuding of the Nazi high command.

Heydrich and the events of the Wannsee conference are also the subject of Robert Harris's novel Fatherland. The novel also portrays an alternate history where Heydrich was promoted to the rank of Reichsführer-SS after the death of Heinrich Himmler.

The Man in the High Castle an alternative history novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick set in the 1960s describes Heydrich as head of the SS and challenging to become Reichs Chancellor after Hitler and his immediate successor, Martin Bormann, are dead.

Heydrich in popular culture

• Kenneth Branagh reportedly said that he had trouble portraying Heydrich in Conspiracy due to the evil that surrounded him. (Stanley Tucci also had similar reservations about playing Adolf Eichmann in the same film.)

• Heydrich was portrayed by David Warner in the 1985 TV Movie Hitler's S.S.: Portrait in Evil. The movie followed the career his subordinate Helmut Hoffmann, played by Bill Nighy.

• The assassination inspired rock group British Sea Power to write the song "A Lovely Day Tomorrow". Originally a b-side, the song was re-recorded with the Czech band The Ecstasy of St. Theresa in both English and Czech for a limited edition release in 2004.

• The song "SS-3" by thrash metal band Slayer is about Heydrich. SS-3 was the license plate number of his car.

• The song "The Hangman of Prague" by black metal band Marduk is about Heydrich.

• The song "1942" by Czech punk band LumpyOis is about the assassination.

References

• SS Service Record of Reinhard Heydrich, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
• The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich: The SS "Butcher of Prague", by Callum McDonald. ISBN 0-306-80860-9
• Assassination : Operation Anthropoid 1941-1942, by Michael Burian. Prague: Avis, 2002.
• The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, by Joachim Fest, Da Capo Press
• "Reinhard Heydrich - Der deutsche Polizeichef als Jagdflieger", by Stefan Semerdjiev, Deutsche Militärzeitschrift, No 41 Sept/Okt.2004, p. 36-38.
• Heydrich: The Face of Evil, by Mario R. Dederichs, tr. Geoffrey Brooks. London: Greenhill Books, 2006.

External links

• Reinhardt Heydrich