Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

Robert Gerwarth., “Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich” Univ. Press, London, 2011, 294 pp. plus 57 pages of notes

This biography is not about a career-orientated desk perpetrator in the Nazi dictatorship.  This is about Reinhardt Heydrich who played a decisive role in developing and promoting the notion of racial enemies that could be defeated only by an expanding terror apparatus.  An apparatus not subject to law and an apparatus that targeted many more groups than Jews.  Heydrich believed that communists and Jews were one and the same and must be destroyed.  For good measure, the gypsys, mentally defective, political opponents, and homosexuals were tossed into the mix.  This program evolved

My Notes:

Pg. xvi:  It is now clear that ideology played a key motivational role for senior SS officers and that any attempt to dismiss them as pathologically disturbed outsiders is highly misleading.  If anything, SS perpetrators tended to be more educated than their average German or Western European contemporaries.  More often than not they were socially mobile and ambitious young university graduates from perfectly intact family backgrounds, by no means part of a deranged minority of extremists from the criminal margins of society.  Also, it is now generally accepted that the decision-making processes which led to the Holocaust developed through several stages of gradual radicalization.

Pg. xvii:  Heydrich was born in 1904 into a privileged Catholic family of professional musicians in the city of Halle.  The great turning point in his early life came in spring 1931 when he was dismissed from military service as a result of a broken engagement promise and his subsequent arrogant behavior towards the military court of honor.  This coincided with the height of the depression and his first meeting with his future wife, Lina von Osten, who was already a committed Nazi and who convinced him to apply for a staff position in Heinrich Himmler’s small but elite SS.  (They became like Father and son until Heydrich’s assassination in June 1942).

Pg. 75:  By the summer of 1934, Himmler and Heydrich had brought the political police agencies in most of the German states under their control and Prussia, the only remaining holdout, was given to the SS that year.

Pg. 89:  Until 1945, the legal basis for police measures remained the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933, an emergency measure which had restricted significant basic rights anchored in the Weimar Constitution, such as the personal rights of prisoners, freedom of speech and the privacy of written and oral communication.  Throughout the Third Reich the German police operated in a permanent state of emergency.

Pg. 151:  The idea of creating ethnically homogeneous nation-states through the suppression, expulsion and often murder of ‘suspect’ minorities was by no means a Nazi invention.  Instead it followed a logic of Social Darwinism and sociological positivism—the idea that human society could be perfected through scientific quantification, ethnic categorization and if necessary, violent unmixing.  A similar logic had already guided the Turkish perpetrators of the Armenian genocide as well as the Bolshevik approach to class enemies.  The main difference from these precedents was that the Nazi project of social and ethnic engineering was not based on the somewhat firmer categories of religion or class.  Rather it was founded on the slippery concept of race that left room for different interpretations. 

Pg. 178:  A short-lived plan in 1940 for getting rid of Jews from all Reich occupied lands involved the proposal to ship them all to Madagascar, a French colonial island off the African coast.  By adopting this plan it was felt the Jews would remain in German hands to guarantee the future good behavior of their racial comrades in America.  This Madagascar project (just like the Jewish reservation project in Poland that preceded it) was thus intended as a form of hostage taking.  After the failure of the Luftwaffe to secure victory over the RAF in the Battle of Britain and the abandonment of the German invasion plan of Britain, the Madagascar plan was dropped, primarily because the sea routes from Europe to the Indian Ocean could not be secured.

Pg 184:  Between 1939 and 1941 Heydrich’s solution to the Jewish problem was ghettoization and expulsion, not systematic, indiscriminate murder.  In October 1941 expulsion through emigration would no longer be allowed.  (Between January 1933 and 31 October 1941 a total of 537,000 Jews had been ‘induced to emigrate’ from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate. P. 211)

Pg. 186:  On 27 March 1941 the pro-German Yugoslav government under Dragisa Cvetkovic was toppled by a military coup, giving rise to fears in Berlin that the new rulers in Belgrade would join the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany.  Hitler decided to attack Yugoslavia and simultaneously Greece, which was already at war with Germany’s ally, Italy, and had successfully resisted the Italian advance with the aid of its British ally.  On 6 April the Wehrmacht marched into Yugoslavia, which capitulated less than two weeks later.  Greece was occupied by German troops by the end of April. 

Pg. 190:  On 22 June 1941, a historically unprecedented invasion army of 3 million German soldiers and more than 600,000 Italian, Hungarian and Finnish troops plunged into the Soviet Union on an extended battle-front of 1,500 kilometers.  By late autumn, the Wehrmacht had captured more than 3 million Soviet soldiers, the vast majority of whom would perish in German POW camps. 

Pg. 203:  In November 1941 Hitler replaced Baron von Neurath with Heydrich in Prague to expedite making this a Jew free city.  Heydrich, of course, kept all his other jobs as well. 

Pg. 208:  December 1941 was a critical juncture in the war.  On 7 December, Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese forces.  Four days later, Germany declared war on the US, Hitler regarded this undertaking as risk-free since the American armed forces would be tied up in the Pacific for at least another year, during which time he would be able to end his European war victoriously and simultaneously attack American maritime transports to Europe without any restrictions.  

Pg. 209:  On 20 January 1942, Heydrich called fourteen senior Nazi civil servants, party officials and high-ranking SS officers to a conference at Berlin’s Lake Wannsee.  This was the conference that finalized the ‘Final Solution’ for eliminating the Jews.

Pg. 245:  The war in the East, Himmler told Heydrich and others in June 1941, would be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which twenty to thirty million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and a crisis of food supply. 

Pg. 280:  In retaliation for the assassination of Heydrich, Hitler ordered the complete annihilation of the Bohemian village of Lidice, population 500 located north-west of Prague, including the murder of all of its 199 male inhabitants and the deportation of all women to a concentration camp.  The children, if Germanizable, were to be sent to foster parents in the Reich.  All buildings were leveled by bulldozing.  This all occurred when a captured Czech parachutist testified that two families living in Lidice had served as contact points for resistance fighters dropped into the Protectorate. 

Pg. 284:  The assassins were finally cornered in the Orthodox Church of St. Cyril and Methodius in central Prague in the early hours of 18 June 1942.  (I have visited that church—bullet holes are still visible in the walls).