Reinhard Heydrich

German Nazi official

• Born: March 7, 1904
• Birthplace: Halle, Germany
• Died: June 4, 1942
• Place of death: Prague, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now in Czech Republic)

Cause of notoriety: Heydrich was instrumental in implementing the Holocaust and was at the forefront of atrocities committed by the Schutzstaffel (SS)/Gestapo.

Active: 1933-1942

Locale: Europe, mainly Germany and what is now the Czech Republic

Early Life

Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (HI-drihk) was the son of Bruno Richard Heydrich, a musician, and Elisabeth Anna Amalia Kranz, a musician’s daughter. While still in school, he briefly joined the Freikorps, but in 1922, he enlisted in the German Navy. His passions were music and physical exercise; he became one of Germany’s most accomplished fencers. For two years he was in the Naval Intelligence Service under the command of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and by 1929 had attained the rank of first lieutenant. According to a disputed story, Heydrich left the navy in 1931 because of a scandal involving the daughter of an officer (or shipyard director). Having impregnated the girl, he then abandoned her to marry Lina von Osten, and a naval court of enquiry dismissed him for conduct unbefitting an officer. It is known that Lina was an ardent Nazi and persuaded Heydrich to join the Nazi Party and to go for an interview with Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS). Himmler named Heydrich to direct his Intelligence Service (later to be dubbed the SD).

Nazi Career

At the helm of the SD, Heydrich’s cold, ruthless efficiency and accelerated energy level propelled him rapidly into a leadership position, particularly after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor on January 30, 1933. By March, 1933, Heydrich had become an SS brigadier general. Heydrich’s intelligence network was noted for its intrusiveness and penchant for the minutest detail; he became one of the Third Reich’s most feared functionaries. His bureau was said to have kept dossiers on all Nazi Party officials, including Hitler himself. Heydrich played a key role in the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934), assisting Hitler and Himmler in the SS’s liquidation of the leadership of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or stormtrooper unit), the rival Nazi paramilitary force; the listing of names that he compiled determined who was to be killed. Heydrich had by October, 1934, risen to a position of power within the SS second only to that of Himmler.

The official German justification for the attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, was orchestrated by Heydrich in what was dubbed Operation Canned Goods (some sources call it Operation Himmler). Heydrich arranged for a group of concentration camp prisoners to be outfitted in Polish uniforms and murdered, their bodies photographed at a frontier radio transmitting station at Gleiwitz, and offered as “evidence” of a Polish attack on Germany. After Poland fell, it was Heydrich who proclaimed the “ghettoization” of the Jewish population as the first step toward genocide. Heydrich and Himmler created the Einsatzgruppen as special mobile killing squads to seize Jews and other so-called undesirables and murder them as German forces swept through Eastern Europe. Used first during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, the Einsatzgruppen were the major agents for extermination until the time of the Wannsee Conference and would be utilized extensively during the campaigns in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

Wannsee and Assassination

In 1941, Hitler appointed Heydrich as Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia), and he arrived at its capital, Prague, on September 21 of that year. The subsequent reign of terror and repression earned him the sobriquet Butcher of Prague. Heydrich set up the ghetto of Terezin (Theresienstadt), from which thousands of Czech Jews were to be deported to the death camps. On January 20, 1942, Heydrich, assisted by his subordinate Adolf Eichmann, presided over the Wannsee Conference, where a more systematic policy of exterminating the Jews of Europe through gas chambers in death camps, labeled the “final solution” (now known as the Holocaust), was discussed, mapped out in detail, and approved.

The effectiveness of Heydrich’s regime in suppressing resistance and increasing war production in the Protectorate led to the decision by the exiled Czech government to assassinate the SS leader. The plan was known as Operation Anthropoid. Four special resistance officers were parachuted in from London and on May 27, 1942, ambushed Heydrich, who was riding in his Mercedes convertible through the streets of Prague. A bomb hurled by one of the officers, Jan Kubis, sent fragments of metal and fabric into Heydrich’s spleen, and he died on June 4, 1942, of blood poisoning.

Impact

Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination set off a series of retaliatory atrocities that included the deaths of ten thousand Czechs and the physical eradication of the village of Lidice. With Heydrich out of the way, Himmler tightened his grip on the SS. The Wannsee Plan was implemented during the remainder of World War II, and Heydrich’s role in its planning was acknowledged by the code-naming of genocidal procedures at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec as Operation Reinhard.

Bibliography

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. An indispensable guide to the evolution and workings of the Holocaust; the role of Heydrich and the Wannsee Conference is closely examined.

Botwinick, Rita Steinhardt. A History of the Holocaust: From Ideology to Annihilation. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. Even though, in a book of vast scope such as this, Heydrich is denoted as a secondary figure, the crucial nature of his participation is clearly evidenced.

Butler, Rupert. An Illustrated History of the Gestapo. Osceola, Wisc.: Motorbooks International, 1992. One of the most incisive accounts of the organization and its administrators. Includes a characterization of Heydrich as both nefarious and enigmatic.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Heydrich is distinctly identified as having taken initiative in decreeing ghettoization and in organizing the Einsatzgruppen in Goldhaven’s controversial work on the degree of culpability of average Germans.

Snyder, Louis L. Hitler’s Elite: Shocking Profiles of the Reich’s Most Notorious Henchmen. New York: Berkley Books, 1989. Heydrich is presented here as an extremely paranoid, self-loathing individual who compensated through sadistic actions.