How a married musician with loving parents and a brilliant mind became an unlikely Nazi monster
Daily Mail | September 10, 2016
There are few buildings in Prague that are more impressive than the Wallenstein Palace. Built in the 17th century, it is a huge and sumptuous Baroque edifice.
Now housing the Czech Senate, the building has always been associated with power, and at no time was that more evident than on the evening of Tuesday, May 26, 1942.
For gathered in its Main Hall was the cream of the Nazi community that ruled what had once been Czechoslovakia, but was by that time the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
The Nazis were there to listen to a string quartet performing a selection of pieces by a German composer who had died four years before. His name was Bruno Heydrich, and the pieces were from an opera he had written in 1895 called Amen.
Set in a forest in central Germany, the work’s protagonist is called Reinhard, a heroic figure who battles an evil peasant leader.
The opera had been a success, and when his first child was born in March 1904, Bruno and his wife decided to name him after its hero. Thirty-eight years later, this son was now the host at the Wallenstein Palace.
Reinhard Heydrich was in the prime of his life and career. A general in the SS; the head of the Reich Security Main Office, which oversaw the Gestapo and most other Nazi security forces; and, since September 1941, the acting Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich identified with the leading figure in his father’s opera.
As he and his wife, Lina, entered the Main Hall, the Nazi functionaries and their Czech collaborators saluted the couple.
Heydrich looked every inch the despotic ruler of 7.5 million souls, his SS uniform bristling with medals and honours.
An accomplished musician, he would have enjoyed the entertainment, and possibly reflected on how successfully he had brought the Czechs into line. His mixture of draconian autocracy, such as hundreds of summary executions, as well as kinder measures — for example, increasing food rations — had proved remarkably effective, and earned him the gratitude of Hitler.
Heydrich might also have thought about his leading role in the extermination of the Jews, and mused on how effectively the Nazi policies, discussed at a conference he’d chaired in January in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, were being put into genocidal practice.
After the concert, Heydrich surprised many by hosting a banquet at the grand Hotel Avalon. Not renowned for his affability, the normally cold Reichsprotector was, in the words of one witness, a ‘master of etiquette, entertaining, interested in everyone, a charming conversationalist’.
Afterwards, he and his wife were driven back to their luxurious country house ten miles outside Prague. At that point, Heydrich might have felt on top of the world.
But in just ten hours, he would be lying in a hospital, fighting for his life, after a grenade was thrown at his car by a member of the Czech resistance. And a week later, just like the hero of his father’s opera, Reinhard Heydrich would be dead.
The assassination of Heydrich was a pivotal moment of World War II.
Although it deprived the Nazis of one of their darkest and most effective stars, it caused the regime not only to unleash horrific reprisals that would see the slaughter of 1,700 men, women, and children, but also to increase the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps.
This weekend sees the release of a film about Heydrich’s killing, starring Jamie Dornan, the serial killer from BBC2’s The Fall, and Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy as his assassins. Called Anthropoid, after the codename of the operation given by Britain’s secretive Special Operations Executive (SOE) which had planned it, the film is not only a recreation of the killing, but an examination of whether it caused more harm than good to the beleaguered Czechs.
But while the moral conundrums of Heydrich’s assassination have often been discussed and portrayed, what is far less scrutinised is the personality of the man himself.
What is seldom queried is how this product of a sophisticated and happy family became a man who exterminated millions.
To get to the roots of Heydrich’s evil, we must start with his childhood.
Born in the city of Halle, 100 miles south-west of Berlin, Heydrich was a frail and slight boy, dogged by illness. Nevertheless, he was determined this would not stop him competing keenly in his favourite sports, such as fencing, sailing and football.
We should not read too much into Heydrich’s single-mindedness. Such confidence came from his extremely secure upbringing, rather than anything inwardly sinister.
His father’s music conservatory was a huge success, and the family lived in a grand style, with a house full of fine furniture. His mother, Elisabeth, was independently wealthy, and while she employed governesses to help raise Heydrich and his brother and sister, she was not a haughty or distant figure.
Young Reinhard did well at school, especially in science, and his early ambition was to be a chemist. As well as loving sports, he also enjoyed detective and spy novels, which would set him in good stead when he founded the SS intelligence service, the SD.
Naturally, as the son of a composer, Heydrich was taught music from an early age. By the time he was six, he was able to read music and to play the violin and the piano.
In essence then, there was nothing abnormal about the young Heydrich, no sign that he was a ‘monster’ or sadistic in any way. He was a bright, talented and cultured boy, who was ambitious, but not excessively so.
Neither does it appear that the Great War had any greater impact on Heydrich than on any other teenager. Like many patriotic youths in Germany and in Britain, he was keen to join up, but he was too young.
While he never experienced the trenches, Heydrich witnessed violence in his hometown. From 1919 to 1920, Halle, like so many German cities, was a hotbed of political violence, in which nationalist Freikorps units, consisting largely of aggrieved soldiers, fought with Communists, while government troops tried to keep order.
The young Heydrich did not care for Communism — a hardly unusual stance — and joined a ‘defence force’ mustered by a Frei-korps unit. According to Robert Gerwarth, author of a magisterial biography of Heydrich called Hitler’s Hangman, there is no evidence Heydrich fought with the Freikorps.
‘His actual involvement in paramilitary activity was, therefore, largely confined to showing off his over-sized steel helmet to his teenage friends,’ writes Professor Gerwarth.
In addition, it appears that Heydrich was not politically motivated. Although he would later claim to be a member of pre-Nazi Right-wing organisations, there is little or no evidence to support this.
However, Heydrich’s slight involvement with the Freikorps crucially taught him that violence was a seemingly legitimate part of the political process.
His flirtation with militarism led him to join the navy in 1922, and it was there that his ruthlessness and ambition emerged.
Although many post-war reminiscences of Heydrich by fellow cadets would be coloured by what he became, it seems that Heydrich, with his cultured upbringing, violin playing and shyness, was a loner.
In addition, there were rumours that he was partly Jewish, which did not endear him to the anti-semitic officer cadre.
The rumours were baseless, but would continue to haunt him, and it is easy to see how Heydrich’s rabid desire to mastermind the extermination of the Jews was a way of showing his Nazi colleagues he was not ‘tainted’ by Jewish blood.
A loner he may have been, but Heydrich was ambitious, and was adept at politicking. He had a knack for showing himself in a good light, and when he received his commission, he was predicted to go far.
However, his ambition soon twisted into arrogance — a quality that would prove to be the undoing of his naval career.
The unravelling started when he met a young lady called Lina von Osten in December 1930. Instantly attracted to each other, they were engaged just before Christmas.
But a young woman in Berlin — whose identity has never been established — also thought she was engaged to Heydrich, and complained to his senior officers.
A military court of honour was convened, in which Heydrich displayed such a supercilious attitude towards the woman that the court threw him out of the navy because his ‘insincerity’, and a series of self-exculpatory lies, did not befit an officer.
His sacking was a personal disaster, but Lina stuck by him. What made matters worse was that his family’s wealth had dwindled because of the economic crisis in Germany in the Twenties — caused by its huge reparations after the Great War and hyper-inflation — and Heydrich could not rely on his father for financial support.
Unwilling to accept job offers he saw as being beneath him, and still yearning to be in uniform, by the middle of 1931 Heydrich was amenable to an introduction made by a family friend to a man who was looking to establish an intelligence service for his political party. The man was Heinrich Himmler, and the group was the Nazi party.
Despite inexperience in intelligence work, Heydrich, drawing on his knowledge of spy and detective fiction, convinced the head of the SS he was the right man. In June, he was offered the post, and joined the Nazis.
Until then, Heydrich had been apolitical, unlike Lina and her family, who were passionate devotees of the Nazis. Lina was delighted with his new job, and described her husband’s meeting with Himmler as ‘the greatest moment of my life, of our life’.
It was a meeting that was to have terrible consequences for millions over the next few years.
Heydrich built up the SD intelligence service — and, as part of it, the Gestapo — into one of the most horrific organs of state repression the world has seen.
It was Heydrich who masterminded the shootings of hundreds of thousands of Jews and others. It was Heydrich who chaired the Wannsee Conference that would provide the blueprint for the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’.
And it was Heydrich who Hitler described as ‘one of the best National Socialists, one of the staunchest defenders of the concept of the German Reich and one of the greatest opponents of all enemies of this Reich’.
So what turned this cashiered young officer from a monied, musical family into such a loathsome figure?
The metamorphosis started because Heydrich was ambitious, and eager to please his masters. It was not the politics of the Nazi movement that appealed to him, but the opportunity it gave for power and status.
But as he got sucked into the system, he became eager to prove that he was more true to Nazism than those who had signed up far earlier. It was the zeal of the convert, but with one extra ingredient — the influence of his wife and her family. So convinced was Lina of the rightness of Hitler’s mission that she would remain an apologist for the regime until she died in 1985.
As Heydrich became more immersed in Nazism, he sincerely believed his actions were ethical. He really did regard Jews as a deadly threat to society, and that their destruction would benefit humanity.
He undoubtedly had a conscience, but ambition and inverted moral certainty, further hardened by war, ensured that he did not waver.
‘It is almost too difficult for an individual,’ he said of the toughness required to fight his enemies, ‘but we must be hard as granite, or else the Fuhrer’s work will be in vain; much later people will be grateful for what we have taken upon us.’
Although it is hard to take the words of Himmler at face value, there may have been a scintilla of truth to the oration he made at Heydrich’s funeral, when he declared that ‘with Heydrich, I know what it cost this man to be so hard and severe, despite the softness of his heart’.
Finally, Heydrich could always assuage what was left of his conscience by convincing himself that violent means justified political ends.
In his eyes, democratic methods were weak, and could not counter the Jews and Communists. Brutality was essential to combat enemies of the Reich, not fine speeches and compromises.
Ultimately, Heydrich committed such barbarism because he felt it to be necessary. He was not born evil, and did not regard himself as such.
His daughter, Silke, speaking in 1971, would deny that her father was intrinsically bad.
‘Was my father an evil man?’ she asked an interviewer rhetorically. ‘If he really was, I should be able to feel this within myself. I have watched myself for a long time and didn’t feel anything of the sort.’
At the end of Heydrich’s father’s opera Amen, the hero is killed. As he dies on stage, he croaks out: ‘May God have mercy upon us!’
Yet surely the man who was given that hero’s name deserved no mercy, in life or in death.
However, while Heydrich certainly merits damnation, we should always try to understand why men such as him become men like him — for the ability to play the violin, to be cultured, urbane and intelligent, does not mean that a man is incapable of a lifetime of monstrous evil.
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