The man known to history as Reinhard Heydrich
was born on the 7th of March 1904 in Halle an der Saale in the Saxony-Anhalt region of
eastern Germany. His full name was Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich. His father was Richard Bruno Heydrich, a noted
composer and opera singer of the time who had named his eldest son Reinhard after the
hero of his first opera entitled Amen, while Reinhard’s middle names, Tristan and Eugen,
were derived respectively from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, and Eugen Krantz,
the name of his maternal grandfather, the director of the Dresden Royal Conservatory. Reinhard’s mother was Elisabeth Anna Krantz,
the daughter of the aforementioned Eugen Krantz. Her background was affluent. She and Richard had met when he was a student
at the Dresden Conservatory, which her father was director of at the time. Reinhard was the first of three children,
with a younger boy, Heinz, arriving a year and a half later, followed by a daughter whom
they called Maria. Reinhard’s youth was one of relative privilege,
growing up as the son of a noted composer who had also become the director of the Halle
Conservatory of Music. Richard Heydrich, who went by his middle name,
Bruno, was a nationalist who instilled a love of Germany in his sons. Reinhard showed promise in many fields of
endeavour from a young age. He was athletic and became a good swimmer,
as well as an accomplished student. From his parents he developed an appreciation
for classical music and he played both the piano and the violin, the latter with some
considerable ability. Yet there was also tribulation for Reinhard
during these years. He was bullied at school, primarily on account
of his supposed Jewish ancestry. Anti-Semitism was commonplace in much of Europe
in the early twentieth century and the Heydrich family were said to have been descended from
Jews. This supposition seems to have been arrived
at by the marriage of Reinhard’s paternal grandmother to a locksmith called Gustav Robert
Süss in the 1870s. This man became Richard Heydrich’s stepfather,
so Reinhard was not actually his grandson in any event, and Süss was also a Protestant
whose name simply sounded Jewish. Yet Reinhard was mocked by his peers in school
as ‘Moses Handel’. These taunts about his alleged Jewish ancestry
would cast a long shadow over his psyche. Reinhard’s youth and early teenage years
were spent against the backdrop of war. At the time he was born Europe had become
a powder keg of political tensions between the great powers, fuelled by nationalism,
colonial competition in Africa and the development of two armed military alliances. On one side was Germany allied with the Empire
of Austria-Hungary and on the other were Britain, France and Russia. Myriad regional conflicts across Europe and
Africa perennially threatened to spill over into outright war, but these were often averted,
that is until the summer of 1914 when a political crisis arose in the Balkans, when the heir
to the Empire of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serb
nationalist. In the weeks that followed what had started
as a regional crisis ballooned into a continent-wide act of sabre-rattling and, in early August
1914, this spilled over into a continent-wide war. The First World War had commenced, but it
would not go well for Germany. After years of stalemate on the Western Front
in north-eastern France, in 1917 the United States entered the conflict on the side of
Britain and France. This, along with political unrest at home
in Germany, spelled the end of the German Empire and in November 1918 the German Kaiser,
Wilhelm II, abdicated. The war was brought to an end and a new German
Republic named after the town of Weimar was established, one which accepted cripplingly
punitive peace terms through the Treaty of Versailles a year later. In the aftermath of the war there was considerable
unrest across Germany. Huge numbers of German workers, buoyed by
the success of the socialist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in late 1917, sought to pressure
the new Weimar Republic into taking a more left-leaning pathway forward, while many on
the right were violently opposed to them. A major incidence of this unrest occurred
in Berlin in January 1919 when a large number of some 50,000 Communists led by Rosa Luxemburg
and Karl Liebknecht and calling themselves the Spartacists rebelled in Berlin, threatening
to take over the state. The Spartacist Revolt was only crushed when
the government armed tens of thousands of ex-soldiers which became known as the Freikorps
or Free Corp, who successfully suppressed the revolt on the 12th of January. The Freikorps became a staple of German life
in the years that followed, being employed by the Weimar Republic to break up strikes
and labour movements wherever they occurred. Though he had just turned 15 years of age,
Heydrich was soon involved in a Freikorps detachment known as Maercker’s Volunteer
Rifles in Halle, after the town was taken over by striking Communists. This unit was substantially responsible for
crushing the labour agitation in Halle in the spring of 1919. Heydrich would later claim that this period
in 1919 was one in which his political sensibilities were significantly shaped. From the very beginning those sensibilities
were profoundly Anti-Semitic. Prejudice against Jewish people was an all
too common phenomenon in Europe in the early twentieth century and indeed Jewish communities
across the continent had faced periodic persecution, pogroms and expulsions in region such as England,
France, Spain, Portugal and Germany going all the way back to the Middle Ages. Heydrich’s Anti-Semitism was therefore unfortunately
not uncommon in Weimar Germany, but the virulence of it was. In 1919, shortly after its establishment in
Bamberg that spring, Heydrich joined the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund, the German Nationalist
Protection and Defiance Federation, a group whose motto was Deutschland den Deutschen,
Germany for the Germans. From its inception the Federation was one
of the most rabidly Anti-Semitic movements within post-war Germany, a time when many
people were at pains to suggest that the Jewish people were responsible for Germany’s defeat
in the war and humiliation ever since. It is hard to determine where Heydrich’s
own extreme Anti-Semitism emerged from. Certainly his parents were not especially
Anti-Semitic and his father had even rented out a small room in the Halle Conservatory
to a local Jewish salesman in the 1910s. Rather Heydrich’s beliefs were shaped by
the generally growing Anti-Semitic fervour within Germany of the post-war period. When he was just eighteen years of age, Reinhard
determined that he wished to join the German navy. This was in itself not an easy position to
obtain. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles
the newly created Reichsmarine was to be limited to just 15,000 marines, while it could not
have any submarines and was restricted to having no more than six Dreadnought-class
battleships. But Heydrich’s family’s upper middle class
background and connections ensured him an entry as a cadet at the Kiel naval base in
northern Germany near the Danish border. By the spring of 1924 he had been promoted
to the rank of senior midshipman and from there he was dispatched to the officer training
base at the Murwich Naval Base in Kiel. In 1926 he completed his training with a six
month stint on the SMS Schleswig-Holstein, the flagship of the North Sea Fleet, before
being sent on a training cruise to the Western Mediterranean, where he visited Spain and
Portugal. Heydrich earned some plaudits during this
time for having matured into a decent officer and, by the summer of 1928, he would rise
to the rank of sub-lieutenant. And he was also ambitious. A childhood friend who met him during a brief
return to Halle around this time noted that Heydrich had articulated his desire to become
an admiral one day. As Heydrich was finding his sea legs, some
signs of the future that might lay ahead for Germany were beginning to manifest in the
south of the country, in Bavaria. The aftermath of the war had seen a great
many German men feeling extremely discontented with the peace settlement. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles had
required Germany to militarily disarm, retaining only an army of 100,000 men, while crippling
war reparations were imposed on the country. When these were periodically not paid, the
French occupied parts of western Germany during the early 1920s. Many individuals were extremely bitter about
this and had begun to join fringe political groups such as the Freikorps, as Heydrich
himself had done in 1919. These movements continued into the 1920s,
with small political parties wishing for an overhaul of the post-war settlement and a
reinvigoration of German national pride. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party,
or Nazi Party, led by an Austrian-born war veteran by the name of Adolf Hitler, was one
such movement based in Bavaria. In November 1923 they would go so far in pursuit
of their goals as to attempt a military uprising in the city of Munich, but this was over before
it had ever really begun. Thereafter, Hitler and several others were
arrested, but the government failed to destroy the party entirely and they would re-emerge
many years later as a political force, one which Heydrich would be drawn to. Heydrich’s path towards the Nazi Party was
in many ways brought about by his own failings within the navy and in particular the unrest
which his extra-curricular activity often created. As early as 1926, when he had been on tour
in the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic, Heydrich had caused some unrest at a naval
base when he became agitated after a British officer’s wife refused to dance with him. By the late 1920s he had garnered a reputation
as a serial philanderer, involved in a string of affairs, often with married women and often
with multiple women simultaneously. Moreover, he had become, by some accounts,
insufferably arrogant towards his subordinates, while his major attentions seemed to be focused
on sports such as rowing rather than his naval duties. All of this came to a head early in 1931 when
it was revealed that he had made a promise to one woman that he would marry her, and
then proceeded to abandon that relationship in favour of Lina van Osten, the daughter
of a minor German aristocrat whom Heydrich had met at a rowing ball in December 1930. A breach of promise of this kind was still
a legal offence in some common law jurisdictions in the early 1930s and it was considered serious
enough that Heydrich was discharged from the Reichsmarine for conduct unbecoming an officer
in April 1931. Heydrich’s expulsion from the Reichsmarine
in the spring of 1931 was a significant turning point in his life. He had, though, ultimately brought it on himself. Throughout the investigation into what had
occurred between himself and the young woman, whose identity is strangely elusive and who
had claimed Reinhard had proposed to her, he deliberately tried to deceive the investigative
panel which consisted of Admiral Gottfried Hansen, the Commander of the Baltic Fleet;
the training officer, Gustav Kleikamp; and the senior-most member of Heydrich’s crew,
Hubertus von Wangenheim. Rather than accept responsibility for what
had occurred, Heydrich claimed it was the woman who had initiated their relationship
and pressured him. When this was found to be categorically false
Heydrich refused to come clean about his conduct and it was this “proven insincerity”,
as the investigative panel referred to it, which led them to take the drastic step of
discharging him from the navy, and Heydrich did not respond well. His future wife, Lina von Osten, later stated
that it was “the heaviest blow of his life” and that he spent days in his bedroom afterwards,
crying in rage and self-pity. He even petitioned the German President Paul
von Hindenburg to look into the matter, but to no avail. Perhaps, given the psychological blow that
all of this constituted it is unsurprising to find that within weeks he would embark
on a completely different career trajectory, one which would dominate the remainder of
his life and would have fearful consequences for huge sections of the population of Central
and Eastern Europe in the years that followed. While Heydrich’s rapid ascent within the
navy and equally rapid downfall in the late 1920s and early 1930s was occurring, the country’s
politics was beginning to take a sharp turn. During the mid-1920s Germany’s political
landscape had stabilised on the back of good economic growth, which reflected the global
economy during the so-called Roaring Twenties. But much of this international growth was
based on speculative investment and, in the autumn of 1929, the stock markets on Wall
Street in New York began to cool, with huge losses being incurred. This was the beginning of a Great Depression
across the economies of the Americas and Europe. Germany was hit particularly badly and by
the early 1930s millions of people had lost their jobs and their life savings. As often happens in such times, extremist
parties were able to exploit the unrest towards their own ends. One such party in Germany were the Nazis,
who had previously attempted a military Putsch under their leader Adolf Hitler in Munich,
back in 1923. Previously they had been a pathetic outfit
who could garner little more than two percent of the national vote, but in the Reichstag
elections of September 1930 they won 18% of the vote and became the second largest party
in Germany. They would continue to grow in popularity
in the years that followed by exploiting the resentment and despair of the German people
at the economic situation. Heydrich was soon involved with the Nazis. Politically they were akin to the Deutschvölkischer
Schutz und Trutzbund of which he had been a member of back in the early 1920s, with
a striking Anti-Semitic stance and a belief in Germany being for what they deemed as ethnically
German people, a nationalist orientation which they conceived of along racial lines. When he met her in December 1930 Lina von
Osten had already been a member of the Nazi Party for some time, having joined over a
year earlier in 1929. Heydrich almost certainly did not need much
convincing, but she was probably a significant figure in influencing him to join the party
himself on the 1st of June 1931, the day after his expulsion from the Reichsmarine was formalised. Six weeks later he also joined the Schutzstaffel
or SS, meaning ‘protective echelon’, one of two major paramilitary wings of the Nazi
Party, the other being the SA or Stormtroopers. Under its leader Heinrich Himmler the SS would
grow to become a major power within Germany. Heydrich was listed as member number 10,120
and Nazi Party member number 544,916. The following 26th of December 1931 he and
Lina were married. They would go on to have four children, Klaus,
Heider, Silke and Marte, born variously between 1933 and 1942 into what was a committed Nazi
family. Heydrich’s life trajectory had taken a major
shift in the course of 1931. But he was now without formal employment,
although the terms of his discharge from the Reichsmarine had included severance pay for
two years. While he was still living off of this pay
a job found him and it came from within the Nazi Party. Around the time that Heydrich had joined both
the Party and the SS in the summer of 1931, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had
been looking to establish a counterintelligence branch for the paramilitary organisation,
one which could act against centrist and leftist groups seeking to block the rise to power
of the Nazis. Shortly after Heydrich joined the SS he was
recommended to Himmler as somebody who could carry out a senior role within this new counterintelligence
unit by Karl von Eberstein, a native of Halle himself whose mother was Heydrich’s godmother. He was also friends with Heydrich’s soon
to be wife, Lina, and so was happy to facilitate the meeting between Himmler and Heydrich. This duly occurred in Munich, at which Himmler
was sufficiently impressed that he hired Heydrich as the chief of the new SS Ic Service or Intelligence
Service, although it is better known by its later name, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, meaning
Security Service. The new position required Heydrich to relocate
to Munich with Lina within days of his accepting the offer. By the 1st of August 1931 he was operating
out of the Brown House, a mansion on Konigsplatz in Munich which the Nazis had purchased in
1930 as their new headquarters. The position was challenging at first, with
Heydrich having to share a typewriter with another member of the SS and receiving low
pay, but over time conditions improved. Much of Heydrich’s work was spent monitoring
Nazi Party members. The rapid expansion of the party in the late
1920s and early 1930s had created fears that many new members and even some Reichstag deputies
had either joined as career opportunists with little ideological belief in the Nazis or
that the party was possibly being infiltrated by state security figures or members of the
Communist Party. And in tandem the SD was charged with making
preparations to begin infiltrating the state security apparatuses itself. By late 1931 Heydrich was overseeing a network
of spies for both these endeavours and had begun gathering intelligence dossiers on centrist
politicians to attempt to blackmail or exploit them in the years ahead. Himmler was more than satisfied with this
early work and when Heydrich married Lina in December the head of the SS marked the
occasion by promoting Heydrich to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer, the equivalent of
a major. Heydrich was rising within the party which
was about to ascend to power within Germany. With the national economic situation looking
ever more ominous, Reichstag elections were called for the summer of 1932. In these the Nazis nearly doubled their vote
on the 1930 election, gaining 37% and winning 230 seats out of the 608 seat parliament,
making them the largest political party in Germany. However, the more centrist parties were determined
to prevent Hitler from becoming Chancellor of Germany and Hitler was unwilling to join
a coalition government in a junior role. As a result, a government was cobbled together
led by Chancellor Franz von Papen, but it too could do little to address the economic
and political crisis and fresh elections in November 1932 failed to break the stalemate. It was in this impasse that a broad coalition
of centrists and business elements within Germany agreed to a deal with the Nazis in
January 1933, whereby Hitler would become Chancellor of Germany and the Nazis would
be given a number of ministerial briefs. The idea was to stabilise the country’s
politics and keep Hitler under control, but this proved entirely illusive. Within weeks a political emergency had been
concocted by the Nazis following a fire at the Reichstag and this was used to pass an
Enabling Act in late March 1933 which effectively allowed Hitler to rule by decree. The Weimar Republic was dead. Heydrich could have expected to occupy a relatively
senior position within the security apparatuses of the new state, but his entire existence
within the Nazi Party had become threatened in 1932 as the Party was making its final
push for power. That year old claims about Heydrich’s partial
Jewish ancestry, the ones which had seen him taunted for being ‘Moses Handel’ back
in school in Halle, resurfaced. This was a serious claim to be levelled against
any Nazi Party member, but it was especially inflammatory for a high-ranking member of
the SS, a group which prided itself on its allegedly unimpeachable credentials as an
organisation of pure-blooded German Aryans, one whose goal was to ensure the racial purity
of Germany going forward. The claims against Heydrich were politically
motivated and originated amongst Party members whom he had antagonised through his counter-intelligence
work in the year since he had joined the SD, but they proved ineffective. By the autumn of 1932 Heydrich had been cleared
of the charge of racial impurity after an investigation by Achim Gercke, the Nazi Party’s
chief investigator of such matters, and was even promoted by Himmler again as chief of
the SD. With the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi
Party early in 1933, and with the charges of racial impurity having been overcome, the
path was clear for Heydrich to rise swiftly within the security apparatuses of the new
Nazi state. Within weeks of Hitler’s appointment as
Chancellor Himmler and Heydrich oversaw the establishment of the Bavarian Political Police,
whereby the police services in Munich and other towns of southern Germany were effectively
placed under the control of the SS and the SD. In the weeks and months that followed Heydrich,
with a growing number of officials working under him, began developing a card index of
the regime’s political opponents throughout Bavaria, be they trade union activists and
labour organisers, Jewish leaders, journalists who were vocally opposed to the Nazis, Communists
or any other kind of overt enemy of the Nazi regime. In tandem he and Himmler were to the forefront
in establishing a new concentration camp near Dachau outside Munich where such political
opponents were subsequently detained. These concentration camps became an all too
familiar site across Germany in the mid-1930s, effectively being a temporary prison constructed
like an army barracks and with thousands of individuals being detained there, often without
any legitimate legal basis for their detention. These developments in Bavaria were not isolated
in Germany. In Prussia, the largest region in Germany,
dominating much of the north and east of the country, the Nazi minister and senior official,
Hermann Goering, had set up the Geheime Staatspolizei, meaning Secret State Police, to act as a version
of the SD in Prussia. It is more infamously known by its abbreviated
name: the Gestapo. Much of this had to do with senior Nazi officials
such as Goering and Himmler trying to carve out their own blocks of power within the new
Nazi state in 1933 and 1934. Thus, when the Reich Interior Minister, Wilhelm
Frick, tried to begin amalgamating these disparate police forces into a national police service
early in 1934, Goering was initial reluctant, feeling that Himmler was trying to outflank
him and take over the Gestapo. However, by the late spring his interests
were being drawn elsewhere, notably his desire to oversee the creation of a new German air-force,
and he reluctantly agreed on the 20th of April 1934 to allow Himmler to take control of the
Gestapo. Two days later Himmler appointed Heydrich
head of the organisation. With this Heydrich was now effectively the
head of both the SD and the Gestapo, making him the most senior counterintelligence and
secret police official in the entire country. In this newly found position of power Heydrich
was immediately charged with a senior role in efforts to crush one of the paramilitary
wings of the Nazi Party. The Sturmabteilung or SA, meaning Storm Detachment,
had grown to an immense size in the course of the early 1930s under its leader Ernst
Rohm. By 1934 it consisted of over two million members
known as Stormtroopers, though that number could be accounted to be as high as three
to three and a half million members if the SS and other groups which were technically
subordinate to it were included. Rohm’s perception of his own power within
the Nazi regime had grown in tandem and he had become increasingly insubordinate towards
Hitler and others. In the late spring of 1934, just as Himmler
and Heydrich were wresting control of the Gestapo from Goering, Hitler determined to
act. Heydrich was pivotal in drawing up a list
of leading SA figures who would need to be purged in order to neuter the organisation. Then on the 30th of June 1934 a series of
attacks which have become known as the Knight of the Long Knives were launched. Rohm was arrested and executed without trial,
along with nearly 200 others. In the months that followed the SA was substantially
neutralised, largely being turned into a sporting organisation, while Himmler’s SS was henceforth
ascendant as the primary military wing of the Nazi Party. Heydrich’s power was immense in the aftermath
of the Night of the Long Knives. Himmler was now the head of the SS and the
German police services and Heydrich was effectively his second in command, with direct control
over the SD and the Gestapo. Thus, while Himmler was the ostensible head,
Heydrich actually ran the operations. In the course of the mid-1930s he developed
a highly sophisticated state security apparatus, one based on a more elaborate version of the
card index system he had developed in Munich several years earlier. Through this method, hundreds of thousands
of alleged political dissidents were monitored and many thousands were arrested and detained
without charge in the growing system of concentration camps which had emerged across Germany to
house enemies of the Nazi regime. Heydrich was also developing a network of
individuals in charge of regional bases who were loyal to him. Notable amongst these were Heinrich Muller,
a former police detective from Bavaria whom Heydrich brought on as a senior official in
Munich, and Adolf Eichmann, a fastidious bureaucrat who joined the SD in 1934, charged with monitoring
the activities of the Freemasons and other suspected groups within Germany. These two would play a significant role in
future events that Heydrich was front and centre to. While Heydrich was rising within the German
security services in the 1930s the Nazi state was preparing for war. Hitler and his associates had come to power
in 1933 with the express goal of launching a new European war to reassert German power
on the continent. They were aware that it would be many years
before this could be undertaken, such was the weakened state of the country militarily,
and had originally envisaged such a war being undertaken from 1941 or 1942 onwards. To this end the Nazis began secretly expanding
the German military immediately in 1933 and then in early 1935 announced publicly that
they were breaching the caps which had been placed on the German military through the
Treaty of Versailles by recruiting over a quarter of a million men into the German army
and establishing a new German air-force called the Luftwaffe. In tandem, Germany’s industrial capacity
to produce weapons, tanks and ammunition was slowly increased. And the Allied powers of Britain and France
largely allowed this to happen, believing enough time had elapsed since the First World
War that Germany should be allowed to rearm to some extent. Even when the Nazis reoccupied the demilitarised
Rhineland in the spring of 1936 little complaint was heard. But graver problems lay not far ahead. As this march towards war was occurring in
the 1930s the Nazi regime was also beginning to aggressively actualise its Anti-Semitic
rhetoric. In the mid-1930s the Nazi state’s main goal
was to politically disenfranchise the roughly half a million Jews who called Germany home,
with the goal of either making these Jewish people second-class citizens or coercing them
into leaving Germany altogether, perhaps to immigrate to the Holy Land where efforts had
been underway since the late nineteenth century to establish communities of Jewish people
from across the world. This campaign of intimidation and political
oppression culminated in 1935 with the so-called Nuremburg Laws which, amongst other measures,
prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews in Germany and restricted both the employment
and economic opportunities of Jewish people across the country. From early on in these events the SD and the
Gestapo were central to identifying Germany’s Jewish people and developing databases on
anyone who was deemed to be particularly subversive from amongst the country’s Jewish community. Thus, by the mid-1930s Heydrich was playing
a central role in the Anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi state, one which would intensify
in the years that followed. By 1936 Heydrich had risen to become a very
significant figure within the new Nazi state. Not only was he one of the most senior individuals
within the security services, but this was reflected in a growing social, economic and
political status. The Heydrichs were increasingly invited to
social gatherings at the Reich Chancellery, where he began to develop a direct relationship
with Hitler. The Fuhrer was impressed by Heydrich’s seeming
uncompromising loyalty to the regime and willingness to execute even the most brutal of policies. Eventually the German Chancellor would come
to refer to Heydrich as ‘The man with the iron heart’, a macabre term of endearment. This aside, throughout his career Heydrich’s
position was always based on his personal relationship with Himmler. Because of his dual positions as head of the
SD and the Gestapo, Heydrich was technically a member of the German Privy Council from
the spring of 1934 onwards, while in March 1936 he was elected as a member of the German
Reichstag, albeit after the spring of 1933 it was a largely ceremonial parliament. In tandem with this career advancement he
also began to earn a significant salary and the wider Heydrich family was able to benefit
from Reinhard’s political connections. During the Summer Olympics, which were held
in Berlin in 1936, the family were provided with their own private box. Thus, despite their marriage being in trouble
privately, owing to possible infidelities by both Reinhard and Lina, the Heydrichs had
become one of the most prominent families in Berlin during the mid-to-late-1930s, based
on Reinhard’s seemingly unwavering dedication to the Nazi state and its brutal ideologies. Heydrich’s area of activity was also beginning
to expand beyond the borders of Germany itself. After the country had rearmed in the mid-1930s
there was a growing thirst to bring parts of what was perceived to be a ‘Greater Germany’
under Nazi rule. This included Austria and also parts of Czechoslovakia,
notably the Sudetenland, which was home to three million ethnically German people. Efforts to bring Austria under German control
had been underway since 1933 when the Austrian branch of the Nazis had applied extensive
pressure on the government in Vienna to try to claim power, eventually culminating in
the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor, Englebert Dollfuss in 1934. His successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, had established
a nationalist government which sought to keep Austria independent from Germany and effectively
prohibited Nazism in Austria to that end. As a result, throughout the mid-1930s Germany,
along with a large body of Austrian Nazis operating from southern Germany, were attempting
to subvert the Austrian state. Heydrich became central to these efforts by
collecting data on public sentiment in Austria, organising Nazi demonstrations there and distributing
clandestine Nazi propaganda throughout Austria which emphasised the common Germanic ancestry
of Austrians and Germans. Eventually all of this work bore fruit. By early 1938 Schuschnigg faced mounting public
pressure within Austria to legalise the Nazi Party and consider the Anschluss, the union
of Austria with Germany. Thus, he declared that a referendum on the
matter would it be held on the 13th of March 1938, and Heydrich would play a part in this. For instance, when Schuschnigg met with Hitler
for negotiations in Bavaria early in 1938, military and police figures such as Heydrich
were asked to attend in order to intimidate the Austrian Chancellor. Schuschnigg’s subsequent agreement to hold
the referendum on unity with Germany simply provoked further aggression and German troops
were sent into Austria on the 12th of March, allegedly to ensure that the referendum was
conducted in a fair manner. It was passed with an overwhelming majority
and Austria was joined with Germany that spring. Himmler and Heydrich were on a plane to Vienna
immediately, landing there on the 13th and holding court in the Hotel Regina in central
Vienna over the next two days where they organised the policing services in Austria, now that
it was part of the German Reich, with Austrian Nazis such as Kurt Daluege and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Before they had left the city Heydrich had
ordered the arrests of thousands of political opponents of the new Nazi regime across Austria. A similar process would play out in Czechoslovakia
once the country came under German overlordship. This process was more complicated than that
which occurred in Austria. Because Czechoslovakia had been formed as
a new country in the aftermath of the First World War, and because the Nazis had displayed
enough aggression in remilitarising and annexing Austria, Britain and France were determined
to prevent a German takeover of Czechoslovakia. Thus, when Hitler began pressing German claims
to the Sudetenland in the autumn of 1939 a conference was held at Munich whereat the
British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain conceded that Germany could annex the Sudetenland
only if it promised to respect Czech independence beyond the ethnically German region. No sooner had this concession been made than
Hitler was working on plans for the annexation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia early in
1939. Again Heydrich was central to these developments
with plans for an invasion of Czechoslovakia detailing how the SD would follow the German
army into the country to arrest perceived enemies of the state there such as Communists,
Social Democrats and other opponents of the Nazis. This plan was never initiated as Czechoslovakia
was annexed in March 1939 without any real conflict, but the plan itself is indicative
of how central to the aggressive German expansion the SD and other security services headed
by Heydrich had become. Much of the operations being conducted by
the SD and Gestapo in Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 focused on immediately identifying
the Jewish people that lived in both jurisdictions and persecuting them. For instance, in May 1938 Heydrich directed
the Gestapo to arrest nearly 2,000 Jews in Vienna on the basis that they had prior criminal
convictions, many of them years old and entirely trivial. By November that year upwards of 5,000 Austrian
Jews had been forcibly deported from the country, largely through the ministrations of the SD
and Gestapo. And this was just one part of how Heydrich’s
role in the Nazi state’s Anti-Semitic policies was expanding in the late 1930s. Another clear sign of this was seen in Germany
on the night of the 9th of November 1938 when a huge wave of attacks was initiated against
Jewish people and Jewish businesses across the country. By the end of Kristallnacht, the Night of
the Broken Glass, hundreds of Jewish people had been killed and millions of Reichsmarks
of damage had been inflicted on Jewish owned businesses and synagogues. Again, Heydrich was central to events. At a gathering of Nazi leaders in Munich shortly
before the pogroms started Heydrich had assured other leading members of the party that the
state security services would not intervene if attacks on Jewish businesses broke out
in an apparently spontaneous fashion. Heydrich’s role in Kristallnacht cannot
be understated. The Nazi regime was determined to make the
wave of violence which swept across Germany on the 9th of November 1938 seem like a popular
movement, one which was driven by ordinary Germans, rather than being directed by the
Nazi state itself. Central to this was ensuring that the state
security services did not intervene and in fact made preparations for interventions against
the Jewish victims, rather than the tens of thousands of perpetrators. Thus, just hours before the violence began
Heydrich had telegrammed Muller in Berlin, who was his deputy in charge of the Gestapo
by this time, and stated that attacks on Jewish businesses and synagogues were not to be hindered
and state police were instead to prepare for the arrest of between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews. Thus, Heydrich was central to the pogrom that
followed. To get a sense of it, in Vienna, a city that
historically had a large Jewish community, 42 synagogues alone in the city were burned
down that night and 2,000 Jewish families were evicted from their homes. The state security services which Heydrich
oversaw across Germany and Austria intervened only to arrest Jewish people. Approximately 30,000 Jewish men in total were
arrested that night and in the days that followed and shipped off to the concentration camps
where more than a thousand died owing to the conditions of their imprisonment in the year
that followed. All of this was indicative of a growing extremity
to the Nazi state’s approach towards the Jewish people living under its rule and also
of Heydrich’s increasingly central role in the rabid Anti-Semitic polices of Hitler
and his followers. This would continue in the months that followed
to the extent that Heydrich would become one of the central architects of the Holocaust
of Europe’s Jews which followed in the early 1940s. By early 1939 the broad parameters of Heydrich’s
role within the Nazi state had solidified. He was, in effect, the senior figure within
the police services, running day to day operations in the SD, holding a large amount of control
over the Gestapo, which Muller had been appointed to run directly, and answerable effectively
only to Himmler within the security apparatuses of the state. Moreover, his roles in the Nazi regime’s
evolving and increasingly brutal attitudes towards the Jewish population and in administering
recently conquered and incorporated regions had been revealed to be pivotal by the Anschluss
of Austria and the events of Kristallnacht. All of this was important, for the Nazis were
now on a collision course with Britain and France. Following the intervention in Czechoslovakia
in the spring of 1939, Hitler began pressing claims to much of Poland on the basis that
land had been taken from the German Reich when the new state of Poland was formed in
1918. However, this time London and Paris were determined
to resist further German aggression and made it clear that any violation of Polish sovereignty
would result in war, and that is what eventually happened. When Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of
September 1939, one week after agreeing a deal with the Soviet Union for the division
of Eastern Europe between the two powers, and just days after conducting a false flag
operation to make Poland look like the aggressor, Britain and France responded by declaring
war on Nazi Germany on the 3rd of September. The Second World War had commenced. The outbreak of the war had an immediate consequence
for the arrangement of Germany’s security services and Heydrich’s position within
them. To better manage the increasing amount of
people and land which was being administered by the Nazis, a new body, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
meaning the Reich Security Main Office, was established with the stated goal of fighting
all enemies of the Reich within and beyond the borders of Germany. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA was
formally created on the 27th of September 1939, just as Germany’s armies were finalising
their conquest of Poland. The new body would have oversight of the SD,
the Gestapo, the Kripo or Criminal Police and a number of other security services. Heydrich was appointed as its first chief. Additionally the RSHA was broken down into
seven offices, which would oversee matters such as ‘Ideological Investigation’ in
Department 2 and ‘Suppression of Crime’ in Department 5. The Gestapo was incorporated into Department
4, where a sub-department, B4, was created to oversee ‘Jewish affairs and evacuation’. Adolf Eichmann, who had begun working under
Heydrich years earlier, was placed in charge of this branch of the RSHA, which would become
significant in the months to come. The early stages of the Second World War went
exceptionally well for Hitler and the Nazis. Poland’s army was no match for the Germans
and the Soviets, who moved in from the east just a few weeks after Germany as a part of
a Non-Aggression Pact, which had been signed between the two powers to divide up Eastern
Europe. Thus, by October 1939 much of Poland was under
German control and a General Government was set up here to administer the country for
the Nazis. The conquest of Poland and indeed the earlier
extension of German authority over regions such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary vastly
expanded the number of Jewish people who were now in harm’s way from the Nazi regime. In the Middle Ages much of Europe’s Jewish
population had migrated to Poland after facing persecution in Western and Central Europe. Consequently, by the twentieth century Poland
was home to some three and a half million Ashkenazi Jews. By comparison, there had been just over 500,000
Jewish people in Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. All of this changed the face of the Nazis’
Jewish policies. The question now was whether the same policy
of intimidation would be employed in order to force the emigration of these Jewish people
out of Nazi-held territory or whether something much more sinister would be devised by the
Nazi regime in Eastern Europe. Heydrich would be central to the so-called
Jewish question from the very beginning of the occupation of Poland in the autumn of
1939. This was increasingly in conjunction with
Adolf Eichmann, who had been assigned to ‘Jewish affairs’ in Department 4 of the Reich Security
Main Office. Eichmann had a particular skill for identifying
and cataloguing huge numbers of people, a skill that was useful for a government obsessed
with identifying all of the Jewish people living within its borders, in an age before
computer databases were available. This was an especially difficult task in late
1939, as the Jewish population of Poland was so large. At this early stage of the war, the same policy
of oppression of the Jewish people in order to coerce them into leaving the Reich altogether
was generally also favoured here. To that end hundreds of thousands of Jews
were being recorded at this time and many were forced into ghettos and other restricted
areas in cities such as Warsaw, while the Nazi state deliberated on a more concrete
policy. Eichmann, with Heydrich’s tacit approval,
was promoting a plan to possibly deport millions of Europe’s Jews to the East African island
of Madagascar as a solution to the supposed ‘Jewish Question’, but eventually something
much more heinous would be decided upon and Heydrich would be absolutely central in its
implementation when it occurred. It was not only the Jewish people who were
suffering in Poland from Heydrich’s actions there however. In the early stages of the war he was largely
responsible for overseeing Operation Tannenberg, an initiative that was directed against Poles
who were deemed to be enemies of the Nazi regime. Lists of such individuals had been drawn up
by the SD even before the invasion of Poland commenced and when the Germans occupied the
country in September 1939 thousands of individuals were arrested, notably politicians who had
been vocal in their opposition to the Nazis in Germany, artists and members of the intelligentsia,
scholars, prominent members of the Roman Catholic Church, which was seen as a probable lightning
rod for opposition to the regime, former Polish police officers, military personnel and many
others. Some of this resulted in mass executions which
became known as the Intelligenzaktion, or Intelligentsia Mass Shootings. In total it is estimated that a minimum of
100,000 Poles were killed or interred as a result of Operation Tannenberg. Some of this even involved mass murdering
the patients of Polish hospitals. Heydrich would have been guilty of abominable
war crimes just for overseeing Operation Tannenberg in the autumn and early winter of 1939, but
much worse was to follow in time. The range of Heydrich’s actions as head
of the Reich Security Main Office expanded as the war spread across Europe. Following the conquest of Poland in the autumn
of 1939, Hitler turned his attention to northern and western Europe in 1940, conquering Denmark
and Norway in stealth operations in the spring and then launching a blistering military assault
on northern France and the Low Countries in the early summer. After six weeks of Blitzkrieg, the feared
lightning war, Nazi flags were flying in Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris, and Britain stood alone
in Europe against the Nazi tide. Months of attacks on Britain from the air
and attempts to cut the country off through a submarine campaign against the country’s
merchant navy followed, but Britain refused to capitulate, and its longevity proved decisive. Eventually Hitler tired of the British effort
and decided from late 1940 onwards that Germany would invade the Soviet Union, with whom it
had earlier signed a Non-Aggression Pact, by which the Russian leader, Joseph Stalin,
and Hitler effectively carved Eastern Europe up between them. Now in the summer of 1941 Germany invaded
the Soviet Union in what was the largest military campaign ever undertaken. Initially, it was very successful, bringing
huge swathes of additional territory in eastern Poland, the Baltic and Ukraine under German
control by the autumn of 1941. This new, rapid expansion of the German Reich
across Western and Northern Europe in 1940 and throughout Eastern Europe in 1941 massively
extended the remit of Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office and in turn the level of atrocities
which it was responsible for. One of the most heinous was its oversight
of the Einsatzgruppen. These ‘deployment groups’ or ‘task groups’
were basically SS death squads which had first been deployed in Poland as part of Operation
Tannenberg. They took their orders from Himmler, but Heydrich
oversaw much of their activity as head of the Reich Security Main Office and Himmler’s
unofficial deputy leader of the SS. In 1941 their conduct became incredibly brutal. The Einsatzgruppen followed closely behind
the front lines of the German army as it advanced into Ukraine and Russia, engaging in mass
executions of Jews, Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war, Romani people and supposed
political dissidents. At Babi Yayr near the city of Kyiv some 33,000
Jews were massacred by the Einsatzgruppen in less than 48 hours on the 29th and 30th
of September 1941. Many similar incidents occurred on the Eastern
Front throughout Heydrich’s tenure as head of the Reich Security Main Office and, by
the end of the war, the Einsatzgruppen had killed upwards of two million people. Another instrument of state terror that Heydrich
was heavily involved in was the Night and Fog decree. This was a measure whereby individuals in
occupied territories could be arrested and detained effectively without any legal basis
if they were judged to be a danger to the Nazi state. The name of the decree, which was formally
implemented in December 1941, was derived from a statement within it that such people
should be arrested under the secrecy of ‘Night and Fog’. Often people detained in this way simply vanished
from parts of Europe such as occupied France or the Low Countries and their families had
no idea what had happened to them. In many instances the unfortunate victims,
of whom there were thousands in the years that followed, were taken secretly to Germany
where they were processed through Heydrich’s SD office and then interrogated. Often such individuals were tortured to make
them reveal details of whatever conspiracy against the state they were believed to be
involved in and in many instances killed or sent to the concentration camps, the latter
of which was often the same as a death sentence. In this way thousands of citizens of occupied
Western Europe, a region that was generally spared the worst horrors of the Nazi regime
that were being carried out in Eastern Europe, fell prey to Heydrich’s machinations as
head of the security services of the Reich. However, the thing which Heydrich is most
remembered for today is the very prominent role he played in the development of the Nazi
state’s response to what they termed ‘the Jewish Question’. As we have seen, Germany’s attitudes towards
its Jewish communities had shifted over time. In the mid-1930s efforts had been made to
disenfranchise Jewish people across Germany by stripping them of their citizenship and
restricting their economic and social freedoms, all with the goal of pressurising the half
a million Jews who lived in Germany into emigrating. This campaign of intimidation became more
sinister with the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938, while the exponential increase
in the number of Jewish people living under Nazi rule following the conquest of Poland
in September 1939 had seen individuals such as Eichmann working on bizarre schemes to
deport all of Europe’s Jews to Madagascar where they would live in a kind of giant open-air
prison. But as lurid as the Madagascar Plan was, it
seemed relatively benign by comparison with the so-called ‘Final Solution’ to the
‘Jewish Question’ which was being worked out by Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and others
in the course of 1941 as the invasion of Russia was commencing. The Final Solution was devised in response
to an increasing awareness that it would prove impossible to remove millions of Jews from
the German Third Reich, particularly so once the campaign against Britain in North Africa
stalled and the possibility of seizing the Suez Canal and with it a naval route to Madagascar
was impeded. Accordingly, in the summer of 1941 it was
determined that the entire Jewish population of countries like Germany, Austria, Poland
and the Baltic states would be identified by Eichmann’s office in Department 4 of
the Reich Security Main Office and then using all of the resources controlled by Heydrich
they would be forcibly brought to the network of dozens of concentration camps which had
been created across Central and Eastern Europe. There some would be selected to work as slave
labour for several months until they were effectively worked to death, while the majority
would be executed on arrival, typically by exposure to lethal chemical gases such as
Zyklon B. This Final Solution would be carried out most
extensively at a number of camps whose names, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and
Sobibor, have become infamous. Those Jews who lived in the Soviet Union would
largely be murdered by the Einsatzgruppen as the German armies advanced eastward. Heydrich was a party to these plans from the
beginning. There is a lack of paperwork with which to
establish the exact timeline of who knew what and when in relation to the evolution of the
Final Solution, but a memo from Hermann Goering to Heydrich dated the 31st of July 1941 gave
authorisation to Heydrich to issue orders to the heads of various government departments
in Germany and the occupied territories if those orders were in line with carrying out
the Final Solution. Despite the particulars of what was going
to occur having all been decided upon by the early autumn of 1941, it was not until the
winter of that year that details of it were provided to a wider range of officials. When this task was assigned it was given to
Heydrich, who along with Muller and Eichmann, organised a conference which was held at an
SS-owned villa in the suburb of Wannsee outside Berlin on the 20th of January 1942. This was attended by some of the senior bureaucrats
in charge of the government departments which would be involved in carrying out the Holocaust
of Europe’s Jews, by identifying those who would be murdered and organising for their
transport to the death camps. It is a striking statement about Heydrich’s
centrality to the Holocaust that he was placed in charge of organising and running the Wannsee
Conference. Historians have long debated what the significance
of the Wannsee Conference actually was. We know, for instance, that the Final Solution
had been arrived at months earlier by Hitler, Himmler and others and indeed that experiments,
which aimed at selecting the gases that would be used to carry out the mass executions,
had been conducted at concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau as early as the
autumn of 1941. So, nothing was actually decided upon at the
house in the south-western suburbs of Berlin on the 20th of January 1942. Rather the significance of Wannsee lies in
the fact that the decisions which had been made months earlier were now being put into
operation. In bringing together some of the most senior
bureaucrats of the Third Reich Heydrich aimed to ensure that the cogs of the genocidal policy
turned smoothly once measures were initiated in the weeks that followed. What is particularly striking about this is
the manner in which genocide and mass murder could present themselves as a piece of bureaucracy,
where individuals who largely sat behind desks in Berlin organising trains, moving personnel
between different camps and filling out paperwork were the ones who in the end oversaw the murder
of millions of Europe’s Jews. At the top of that bureaucratic pyramid at
the outset of the Holocaust was Reinhard Heydrich. It was not all abominable deskwork for Heydrich,
much to Himmler’s regular disapproval. Back in 1935, when Goering had first started
rebuilding the German air-force into what would become the Luftwaffe, Heydrich had begun
training as a pilot and had intermittently continued doing so throughout the second half
of the 1930s, eventually completing his training at the flight school at Werneuchen north-east
of Berlin in 1939 as the war was just beginning. Himmler was adamant that such a senior figure
within the SS should not be flying combat missions and initially forbade Heydrich from
doing so once the war broke out. But as the fighting continued into the early
1940s Heydrich became insistent and was assigned to the Norwegian front in the spring of 1940,
where he served for a month as part of Jagdgeschwader 77. This was a relatively safe theatre of the
war, but his decision in the summer of 1941 to join the German air-force in its operations
on the Eastern Front following the invasion of the Soviet Union was altogether more hazardous. And so it proved. Heydrich was shot down by flak anti-air guns
when flying over the Dniester River in central Ukraine on the 22nd of July 1941. Despite crash-landing in enemy territory he
made it back to the German lines and from there to Berlin. When he did he received an express command
from Hitler that he was not to fly again. While Heydrich had been permanently grounded
following his brief period of active duty on the Eastern Front, he was soon being employed
in a new fashion which took him away from his main duties as head of the Reich Security
Main Office and the SD. In September 1941 he was appointed Deputy
Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Protectorate had been established in March
1939 following the virtual annexation of Czechoslovakia by Germany. At that time the country was dismembered into
different parts, the Sudetenland, for instance, having been entirely annexed by Germany in
late 1938. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was
one of the new entities. It basically consisted of the region around
what is now the Czech Republic or Czechia and included the city of Prague. With a population of some 7.5 million people,
a considerable economic output and a significant geographical location in the centre of the
Reich, the Protectorate was an important colony of the Reich during the war years. It was ruled by a Protector or viceroy who
was appointed by Hitler and governed the region in Germany’s interest. However, the Protector from 1939, Konstantin
von Neurath, was perceived as being too moderate and anti-German sentiment and resistance to
Nazi rule had been growing there in the early 1940s. For this reason a decision was taken in the
autumn of 1941 to appoint Heydrich as von Neurath’s deputy and the all but governor
of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. If Hitler wanted a more stringent viceroy
to represent him he picked the right individual. When he arrived to Prague Heydrich was determined
to crackdown severely on any form of political dissidence. Von Neurath was an old-school conservative
diplomat with little affinity for the Nazis. He had been selected as Protector of Bohemia
and Moravia in the spring of 1939 as the war had not yet erupted and Hitler wanted somebody
who was a moderate, and was acceptable to some of Europe’s heads of state. He had been commensurately lenient in his
methods. A particular issue was the widespread proliferation
of Communist literature by the Czech Resistance. Heydrich was determined to show his new subjects
that he was the direct opposite from day one. Thus, martial law was immediately imposed
by Heydrich following his arrival at Prague on the 27th of September and the following
morning he had the flags of the SS raised above the turrets of Prague Castle. In the days that followed he used his exceptional
powers to issue lists of individuals who were considered enemies of the state and who were
to be executed. Many of these were already under detention
and were awaiting trials which they were now afforded. On the 30th of September alone 58 people were
executed and 256 more were sent to Gestapo prisons. This was just the initial bloodletting. By the end of November 1941 over 400 people
had been executed and over 6,000 had been arrested. This was a huge security operation and 1,800
Gestapo officers were employed across the Protectorate by the end of 1941. Many of those arrested were sent to Mauthausen-Gusen
concentration camp in Upper Austria where only 4% of those so incarcerated survived
the war. But while Heydrich’s methods quickly earned
him the sobriquet, ‘The Butcher of Prague’, they were also effective. By early 1942 the Czech Resistance had been
depleted considerably and with the confiscation of dozens of wireless transmitters political
dissidents across the country were robbed of the ability to communicate between isolated
Resistance cells. Moreover, Heydrich was a shrewd propagandist
and tried to buy off much of the Czech populace with labour reforms and the distribution of
the largesse from confiscated properties amongst the country’s workers. This was, when it came down to it, the main
reason why Heydrich was sent there, for the Protectorate was critical to the German war
economy, with a major munitions factory at Brno and the Skoda car manufacturing company
at Pilsen providing valuable automobiles for the war effort. Heydrich’s time as governor of Bohemia and
Moravia was a brutal conclusion to what was a brutal career. Hundreds were murdered in the weeks following
his arrival and thousands more were sent off in what was a virtual death sentence to the
concentration camps. In addition, Heydrich began forcing tens of
thousands of Czech people into what was effectively slave labour. In the first four months of 1942 approximately
40,000 Czech labourers were added to a huge list of individuals who were to be forcibly
moved from the Protectorate to Germany to make up for manpower shortages in the Reich,
as German men were sent in ever increasing numbers eastwards to Russia. He did all of this with an ideological fervour
that was virtually unmatched by any of his colleagues within the Nazi hierarchy. In an address to the Protectorate government
on the 19th of January 1942 he stressed that with a firm hand he had done more to bring
the region under control in four months than had been achieved in the previous two and
a half years, and more was to come he claimed. The next task was to introduce, quote, “a
correct and un-ambivalent education of the [Czech] youth” in an attempt to further
Germanize the country. Brutal though his methods were, they were
all approved of in Berlin, where the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, noted in his diary,
“The policy that Heydrich has pursued in the Protectorate can be described as nothing
short of exemplary.” Given the immediate brutality of Heydrich’s
governance of Bohemia and Moravia in late 1941 and early 1942, it is unsurprising that
it immediately aroused clandestine opposition within the upper ranks of the Czech Resistance. Indeed Heydrich’s reputation had preceded
him and already on the 3rd of October 1941, just a week after the man with the iron heart
had taken up his position in Prague, the head of the Czech resistance in exile in Britain,
Jan Šrámek, and his advisors had determined that they would attempt to assassinate Heydrich. To this end it was decided to send two Czechoslovak
resistance fighters, Jozef Glabcik and Jan Kubis, to Bohemia to oversee the mission. Glabcik and Kubis, who were Slovak and Czech
respectively, were in London at the time, but were quickly prepared for the mission
which was codenamed Operation Anthropoid. Then on the 28th of December 1941 they were
flown over the Czech countryside on a British RAF plane before parachuting down to the east
of Prague. In the hours that followed they made contact
with the Czech resistance on the ground and began planning how to execute the governor
of Bohemia and Moravia. It would be five months before they moved
against Heydrich. Part of the problem for Gabcik and Kubis was
that Heydrich was often absent from the region. At the time that they parachuted into Bohemia
in the dying days of 1941 Heydrich was in the middle of planning the Wannsee Conference,
which had been originally scheduled for early December, but which had to be rescheduled
following the attack by the Empire of Japan on the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl
Harbour in Hawaii, which resulted in entry of the US into the Second World War. Given his myriad duties it was often the case
that Heydrich’s routine changed, making planning an attack on him difficult. However, an opportunity presented itself in
late May when it was learned that Heydrich was scheduled to fly back to Berlin where
Hitler was proposing to send him to France to take over the occupation government in
Paris. The road to the airport contained several
tight bends where the driver of Heydrich’s car, Johannes Klein, would have to slow down
considerably, and Heydrich had taken to riding around without a security detail in an open
car in the warm late spring weather. Having examined the road he would travel on
Gabcik, Kubis and their associates within the Czech Resistance decided on a particular
location where the pair would ambush Heydrich’s car and assassinate the governor. The date would be the 27th of May 1942. On the morning of the 27th Heydrich set off
from at approximately 10.30am. The location Gabcik and Kubis had selected
for the ambush was near a tight curve on the road Heydrich would be travelling on and where
the car would have to slow down in order to take the turn. As the car neared it that morning Gabcik emerged
from his hiding place and took aim at the vehicle with a Sten sub-machine gun, however,
his gun jammed and failed to fire. Had Heydrich simply ordered Klein to press
his foot on the accelerator and get them out of there at that point then he would have
survived the attempt on his life, but instead Heydrich, who believed Gabcik was acting alone,
commanded Klein to slow down and went to draw his Luger pistol to gun the Resistance fighter
down. It was at this juncture that Kubis emerged
from his hiding place and threw a grenade at Heydrich’s car. It bounced somewhat away from the vehicle
when it hit it, but the explosion was sufficient as the blast injured Heydrich in his chest,
spleen, ribs and lung. He was, though, still alive and a shootout
followed, before Gabcik and Kubis fled. At this point Heydrich collapsed by the side
of the road as the driver Klein chased after the pair of assailants. As they fled the scene Gabcik and Kubis believed
that the assassination attempt had failed, but they were wrong. Heydrich was still alive, but in very bad
shape. Klein could not make it back to drive him
to a hospital as he had been shot in the leg by Gabcik when he had chased after him. Instead a Czech woman who had been nearby
went to him following the shootout and a van was flagged down which transported him to
the nearby Bulovka Hospital in Prague. There a splenectomy was performed to remove
much of his damaged spleen along with another operation to debride his lung and diaphragm
and treat the chest wound. But it was all to no avail. Although his condition seemed to improve in
the days that followed, such that he was lucid enough to communicate when Himmler visited
on the 2nd of June, on the 3rd Heydrich fell into a coma and died the following day. The exact cause is not one-hundred percent
clear, given the range of injuries he had sustained, but it was most likely from sepsis. He was 38 years of age. Perhaps the most curious thing about the assassination
was that Heydrich was usually extremely cautious when it came to his personal security. Back in Berlin the entire Heydrich house was
linked by alarm bells to local police stations so that any intruders would be quickly apprehended. When travelling around the German capital
the head of the Reich Security Main Office had cars fitted with machine guns and pistols
in case he was ever attacked in the way Gabcik and Kubis had ambushed him in Prague. Perhaps most amazingly, Heydrich had been
personally responsible for drawing up guidelines for the safety measures which should be followed
by senior members of the regime and the Nazi Party during wartime. And in the weeks leading up to his assassination
the Gestapo and other security services under Heydrich’s overall command had received
numerous reports that the Czech resistance and other elements amongst the Allies were
planning to attempt to assassinate him. One of these had involved the arrest and interrogation
of a Russian who had been apprehended in Warsaw on his way to Prague with a sniper rifle disguised
inside a secret compartment of his suitcase. Another report had specifically noted Czech
Resistance fighters who had parachuted into the country as Gabcik and Kubis had. This makes Heydrich’s complacency in riding
around Prague in an open car without a proper security detail somewhat confounding, but
he appears to have viewed it as a political point of principle. A major security presence around him would
suggest that he feared the Czechs and would damage his prestige as the iron-fisted governor
of the region. If this was his view it was an ultimately
fatal miscalculation on his part. Brutal reprisals were carried out in Bohemia
and Moravia in the weeks that followed in response to Heydrich’s assassination. At least 13,000 people were arrested, while
entire villages were massacred for having the flimsiest of possible links to the Resistance. One of these, at the village of Lidice, roughly
twenty kilometres outside Prague, resulted in the massacre of nearly 200 civilians, while
hundreds more were arrested and sent to the concentration camps where the majority of
them died in the months that followed. And the brutal crackdown also resulted in
the locating of Gabcik and Kubis. On the 18th of June 1942, two weeks after
Heydrich had died in hospital, the pair were cornered, along with several other members
of the Czech Resistance, in the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius in Prague. A six hour shootout followed, during which
dozens of German soldiers were killed or wounded before the church was successfully stormed. Gabcik and several others committed suicide
before they were taken alive. Kubis was wounded by a grenade blast and was
unable to kill himself, but he died from his wounds anyway shortly after the Germans entered
the building. Even this did not bring the violence to an
end and reprisals against the Czech populace continued for weeks thereafter as the people
of Bohemia and Moravia were made pay a high price for the assassination of Heydrich. Heydrich was the most high profile member
of the Nazi regime to be assassinated during the Second World War. His funeral was accordingly organised in a
lavish fashion and used extensively for Nazi propaganda purposes. His body was first put on display in the courtyard
of Prague Castle on the 7th of June 1942, during which time tens of thousands of Czech
citizens were ‘encouraged’ to pay their respects. From there his body was transmitted to Berlin
where the main funeral ceremony was held on the 9th of June in the Mosaic Room of the
Reich Chancellery. There the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels,
stage-managed the ceremony to have Hitler and others enter as Richard Wagner’s Twilight
of the Gods was played. Himmler delivered the eulogy, while Hitler,
who privately blamed Heydrich for allowing himself to be assassinated, laid the Blood
Order medal, the highest distinction awarded by the Nazi Party, in Heydrich’s coffin. Thereafter he was buried in the Invalidenfriedhof,
a military cemetery in Berlin. Hitler had intended that a giant monument
would be erected here after the war, but today Heydrich’s grave is unmarked. In the days that followed his funeral the
man who more than nearly anybody else within the Nazi regime was responsible for the carrying
out of the Holocaust was lionised by the Nazi media as the perfect Aryan. Heydrich might well have faced the consequences
of his heinous actions in the long run anyway even had he not been killed outside Prague
that summer day in 1942, for the Third Reich was doomed. When he arrived to Bohemia and Moravia in
the late autumn of 1941 the German war effort seemed infallible. German armies continued to move eastwards
with great speed into Russia and towards the cities of Moscow and Leningrad, with the Einsatzgruppen
which Heydrich had been central to establishing conducting their deadly work behind the front
lines. But while Heydrich was presiding over mass
executions and arrests in Prague things soured in Russia in the early winter of 1941. The German advance stalled outside the main
cities in the face of the first stringent resistance from the Russians that the Germans
had encountered. Then the winter set in and the logistical
preparations of the German Wehrmacht were revealed to have been very poor as tens of
thousands of German soldier were killed or incapacitated by the Russian winter as they
did not have suitable winter clothes to withstand the cold. By the time Heydrich was assassinated in the
summer of 1942 the war on the Eastern Front had settled down into a stalemate, but the
swift German victory that had been obtained in France in 1940 looked ever more elusive. Things got precipitously worse for Germany
in the months following Heydrich’s death. Hitler’s hopes on the Eastern Front rested
on gaining victory over the Russians at the southern city of Stalingrad in the winter
of 1942, an engagement which ended in a spectacular Russian victory in February 1943 and the surrender
of the German Sixth Army. The Russians then went on the attack and the
Germans were being pushed back into Ukraine and then Poland throughout 1943 and 1944. Simultaneously the Western Allies led by the
United States and Britain opened a Southern Front in Italy in the summer of 1943 and then
a Western Front in France a year later. Finally, in 1945 the Allies streamed into
Germany from west and east. Hitler killed himself in Berlin on the 30th
of April 1945 before he could be taken alive, as did other senior Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels. Germany formally surrendered just over a week
later, bringing the war in Europe to a conclusion. In its aftermath the senior members of the
regime and the SS were put on trial at the city of Nuremburg and most were executed for
their crimes thereafter, notably Heydrich’s successor as head of the Reich Security Main
Office and the SD, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Had he survived Heydrich would have been presented
in 1945 with the choice of suicide, attempting to flee from Europe or standing trial and
being executed. Reinhard Heydrich was in many ways the vilest
of all the Nazis, an individual who oversaw the extension of genocidal policies and mass
murder across the continent of Europe during the Second World War. What is perhaps slightly strange about this
is that his rise to his position was in many ways so mundane. From a very young age he had exhibited Anti-Semitic
tendencies, which were perhaps exacerbated by having been criticised by his peers as
a teenager on account of his own alleged Jewish ancestry. But as he grew into his adult years he did
not act on these in any overt way and his career trajectory throughout the 1920s was
relatively conventional for an aspiring naval officer. However, this rather routine development was
thrown out of kilter in 1931 when he was simultaneously expelled from the German navy and then introduced
into the upper echelons of the Nazi Party by his soon-to-be wife. From there, once Heinrich Himmler realised
that Heydrich had an unusual talent for counterintelligence and security services work, a species of bureaucratic
demon was effectively in the fashioning, one whose actions were so calculated and emotionless
that even Adolf Hitler would come to refer to him as the man with the iron heart. The crimes Heydrich committed over the next
ten years down to his death are hard to enumerate. As successively head of the SD, the Gestapo
and then the Reich Security Main Office he was responsible for arresting and terrorising
tens of thousands of people throughout Germany during the 1930s, a practice which was extended
to countries like Austria as the Reich began expanding from 1938 onwards. Once the war began he oversaw Operation Tannenberg
whereby tens of thousands of Poles were executed and murdered without trial or due process. Already at this stage he was involved in the
operations of the Einsatzgruppen, which would go on to murder approximately two million
people in Eastern Europe during the war. Then, in the course of 1941 Heydrich was heavily
involved with others from within the Reich Security Main Office in developing the Final
Solution, whereby millions of Europe’s Jews would be mass murdered in the concentration
camp system which had been developed across Central and Eastern Europe. It was Heydrich who organised and oversaw
the conference at Wannsee in January 1942 where details of what would become the Holocaust
were transmitted to several senior bureaucrats of the Reich and the terrible process was
initiated. Bizarrely, Heydrich’s ruthless and brutal
crackdown on political dissent during his brief term as Governor of Bohemia and Moravia
almost seems like a footnote to his career when judged against everything else that it
involved. Given all of this it is entirely safe to say
that Reinhard Heydrich represented the epitome of the evil that was the Third Reich. What do you think of Reinhard Heydrich? Was he the perfect Nazi and were the allies
justified in plotting his assassination? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
