Reinhard Heydrich

Text Reference, Who's Who in Nazi Germany.

Head of the Reich Main Security Office and the leading organizational architect of the Nazi 'Final Solution', Reinhard Heydrich was born in Halle, a provincial town in Prussian Saxony, on 7 March 1904. The son of a Dresden music teacher who had founded the First Halle Conservatory for Music, Theater and Teaching, Heydrich joined the Freikorps in 1919 and was strongly influenced in his early years by the racial fanaticism of voelkisch circles. On 30 March 1922 he entered the Reichsmarine in Kiel, serving for a time under Wilhelm Canaris who nurtured his taste for naval intelligence work. In 1931 Heydrich was forced to resign from the navy by Admiral Raeder for 'conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman', after compromising the virtue of a shipyard director's daughter. In July of the same year he joined the NSDAP and then the SS, attracting the attention of Himmler and rising rapidly through the ranks. Appointed SS Major on 25 December 1931, then SS Colonel and Chief of the SD (Security Service) in July 1932, Heydrich was promoted to SS-Brigadefuehrer on 21 March 1933 and, in reward for his murderous services during the Roehm putsch, became SS Lieutenant-General on 1 July 1934.

Tall, slim, blond-haired, with slanting, deep-set eyes, Heydrich with his military bearing and ice-cool hardness seemed to epitomize the 'Nordic-Aryan type' of Nazi mythology. His athleticism - he was a first-class fencer, an excellent horseman and a skilled pilot - allied to his talent as a violinist and his orderly, disciplined exterior impressed Himmler, who selected him as his right-hand man. As Himmler's assistant in securing control of the Munich and then the Bavarian police after the Nazi seizure of power, Heydrich assured the successful 'co-ordination' of the political police in the other German Laender during 1933-4. Heydrich soon intrigued his way to becoming Chief of the Berlin Gestapo and by 1936 was given command of the security police throughout the Reich.

An able technician of power, ruthless, cold and calculating, without any compunction in carrying out the most inhuman measures, Heydrich made himself indispensable to the masters of the Third Reich. Yet the arrogant facade disguised a deeply split personality, a neurotic temperament and pathological self-hatred which found its outlet in a boundless greed for power, morbid suspiciousness and exhibitionism. A sense of 'racial' inadequacy, the gnawing uncertainty caused by his suspected half-Jewish origins - utilized for blackmail purposes by his rivals for power though never established as a fact - added to his built-in sense of inferiority....

...The most satanic consequence of this accumulation of power was revealed in Heydrich's implementation of the order for the wholesale extermination of European Jewry. Already before the war, Heydrich had concentrated the management of Jewish affairs in his hands, though in 1938 the emphasis was still on a policy of forced emigration. One of the instigators of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, Heydrich had sent [Adolf] Eichmann to Vienna to organize a 'Center for Jewish Emigration' and, impressed by his success, had created a similar center in Berlin.

...His Einsatzgruppen, which had already killed tens of thousands of Poles and Jews with the co-operation of the German military, were to murder in all a million Russian and Polish Jews as well as many Soviet officials.

To co-ordinate the action of various government and Party agencies, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 to discuss ways and means of implementing the 'Final Solution of the European Jewish Question'. In the circumlocutory language used to disguise the policy of mass murder which he had a considerable part in devising, Heydrich described how Jews capable of work 'are brought to these areas and employed in road building, in which task undoubtedly a large part will fall out through natural diminution'. In other words they would be sent to their death through hunger, exhaustion or disease and, where required, by murder squads. The surviving remnant would be given appropriate 'treatment' as they represented a 'natural selection', constituting the 'germ-cell of a new Jewish development should they be allowed to go free'.

...On 27 May 1942 he was gravely wounded by two Free Czech agents, trained in England and parachuted into Czechoslovakia, who opened fire on his car and rolled a bomb under it. The assassins were discovered, along with more than a hundred other Resistance men sheltering in a church, and massacred by the SS. Heydrich died of his wounds on the morning of 4 June 1942 and was eulogized at his funeral by Hitler.