Background

Ethnicity: Reinhard Heydrich was of German and Jewish ancestry.

Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was born on March 7, 1904, in Halle an der Saale, 20 miles northwest of Leipzig, in the German state of Saxony. Heydrich's father, Bruno Richard Heydrich, was a musician, opera singer, and composer. He was the director of the music conservatory in Halle, which he had founded in 1901.

Bruno's father was a carpenter but had died in 1916. His mother married a mechanic named Gustav Süss. Although he was not Jewish, Süss was a common German-Jewish name at the time. The clear implication is that Heydrich senior was Jewish, and throughout his life, Reinhard Heydrich sought to suppress details of his Jewish ancestry. From his mother's gravestone, he is said to have erased the suggestive forename, Sarah.

Heydrich's mother, Sarah Elisabeth Krantz, a Roman Catholic, was the daughter of his father's teacher, who was the director of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Dresden. According to André Brissaud, the author of the Nazi Secret Service (1972), Reinhard Heydrich's grandmother was Jewish.

As a boy, he lived in an elegant home with his family enjoying elevated social status. But young Heydrich also suffered as the target of schoolyard bullies, teased about his very high pitched voice and his devout Catholicism in the mostly Protestant town. He was also beaten up by bigger boys and tormented with anti-Jewish slurs amid rumors of Jewish ancestry in his family.

At home, Heydrich's mother believed in the value of harsh discipline and frequent lashings. As a result, Heydrich was a withdrawn, sullen boy, unhappy, but also intensely self-driven to excel at everything.

During World War I and its aftermath, Bruno Heydrich could barely keep the conservatory open due to the economies imposed by the war. As his family struggled economically, Heydrich, still in his teens, was attracted to racist (völkisch) nationalism. He watched demonstrations, strikes, and street battles in Halle during the last year of the war and the revolutionary chaos that followed. At 15, he joined the paramilitary Maracker Freikorps, a band that fought against revolutionary groups in Germany. He later enlisted in a home defense force and joined the Deutscher Schutz und Truzbund, a nationalist and anti-Semitic organization.

Education

Shlomo Aronson, the author of Reinhard Heydrich (1971) claims that when at school the other children taunted Heydrich about being Jewish. Peter Padfield suggests that "Bruno was in appearance and manner just what many of the good citizens of Halle took to be Jewish." He goes on to argue: "Reinhard, an introspective lad who was at a vulnerable age at the time, was particularly disturbed and despite his father's denials wondered if this dark, rather comical, pushing figure did perhaps have Jewish origins and become confused and resentful."

Heydrich graduated from Johann-Gottfried-Herder-Gymnasium in 1922. He later attended naval officers' courses at a Mürwik Naval School in 1924-1926.

Career

Reinhard Heydrich entered the German navy in 1922. Commissioned as a naval officer, he was discharged in 1931 after a naval court of honor found him guilty of misconduct (for refusing to marry a shipyard director’s daughter with whom he had had an affair). That same year he joined the SS. Soon after a chance introduction to Himmler, Heydrich was entrusted with the organization of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; "Security Service"), the intelligence and surveillance arm of the SS.

After Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Heydrich was appointed chief of the political department of the Munich police force, and he helped bring the political police forces throughout Germany under Himmler’s control. Heydrich rose rapidly through the ranks of the SD. Because Himmler was only four years older than Heydrich, Heydrich's hopes for advancement could be realized only with his specialization. He was appointed SS chief for Berlin in 1934, and when Himmler became chief of all German police forces in 1936, Heydrich took charge of the SD, the criminal police, and the Gestapo.

Heydrich played a role in the 1938 purge of the German army high command and planted false information that led to a similar purge by Stalin of the Red Army. As head of the Gestapo, Heydrich could incarcerate enemies of the Reich at will. During Kristallnacht in November 1938, Heydrich ordered the arrest of thousands of the Jewish by the Gestapo and the SS and their imprisonment in concentration camps. In 1939 Heydrich became head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt ("Reich Security Central Office"), which was in charge of all security and secret police in the Third Reich.

Heydrich masterminded the fake "Polish" attack on the Gleiwitz radio transmitter that provided Hitler with a pretext for invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Soon afterward Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann began organizing the first deportations of the Jewish from Germany and Austria to ghettos in occupied Poland. Heydrich also organized the Einsatzgruppen ("deployment groups"), mobile killing squads that murdered almost one million Soviet and Polish Jewish in German-occupied territories. To increase German control of the ghettos, he ordered the establishment of Judenräte ("Jewish Councils") to implement German directives in the Jewish ghettos of German-occupied Poland.

Heydrich was instrumental in the Nisko and Lublin plans to confine the Jewish to limited districts set up to contain them and in the proposed deportation of all European Jewish to the island of Madagascar, a plan that was never implemented. Some historians believe that the impracticality of this plan encouraged the Nazi course of mass murder.

On July 31, 1941, Hermann Göring commissioned Heydrich to carry out a "final solution to the Jewish question," authorizing him to take all organizational and administrative steps necessary for the extermination of the Jewish. Heydrich chaired the notorious Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), whose participants discussed the logistics of the "final solution."

In September 1941, Heydrich had been appointed Reichsprotektor (governor) of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). He combined repressive measures and mass executions with an attempt to mollify Czech peasants and workers by improving social and economic conditions. His success in "pacifying" the Czech population lulled Heydrich into a false sense of security, and on May 27, 1942, two Free Czech agents mortally wounded him with a bomb while he was riding in his car without an armed escort. He died June 4 in a Prague hospital. Gestapo officials retaliated for his death by executing hundreds of Czechs and wiping out the entire village of Lidice.

Achievements

• Reinhard Heydrich managed to become one of the top officials in the Third Reich. He was second in importance to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization. Himmler delivered the key address at a state funeral on June 9. Hitler recognized Heydrich at the funeral for his contribution to Nazism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Reinhard Heydrich: The Ideal National Socialist

    (Translated from three original Schutzstaffel publications...)

    2004

Religion

Being baptized brought up Roman Catholic Heydrich gradually became less involved with religion and became non-practicing. He also came to consider the church's political power and influence a danger to the state.

Politics

Heydrich joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in Hamburg on 31st May 1931.

Views

On September 21, 1939, Heydrich hosted a conference at which he stressed the necessity of keeping the Jews in "as few concentration centers as possible," as a prerequisite for the "ultimate aim." He also mandated the creation of a Council of Jewish Elders to ensure that all orders given to the Jews were executed. If they were not, the Council members were to be threatened with "the severest measures."

At a meeting on November 12, 1938, Heydrich stated that simply restricting the Jewish, whom he called "the eternal subhumans," was insufficient, one had to completely get rid of them. On January 24, 1939, Field Marshal Hermann Goering told Heydrich to solve the "Jewish problem" by "emigration and evacuation." Goering created an agency for Jewish emigration and gave it over to Heydrich. In June 1940, after 200,000 Jewish had emigrated, Heydrich wrote to the Reich Foreign Secretary Joachim von Ribbentrop that emigration alone could not take care of all the Jewish and that "A territorial Final Solution has thus become necessary." In May 1941, Heydrich sent his underlings out with the message that due to the pending "Final Solution," the emigration of the Jewish from France and Belgium was forbidden.

Heydrich was involved in the execution of this "Final Solution" from the start. In the summer of 1939, Himmler assigned the job of mass murder to the Einstatzgruppen, killing squads under the control of Heydrich's security police. Most of the commanders came from Heydrich's SD. Heydrich oversaw the massacre of thousands of the Jewish, Polish leaders, communists, and clergymen. He once commented, "We have had to be hard. We have had to shoot thousands of leading Poles to show how hard we can be." In 1941, after the SS established extermination camps in Poland, Heydrich took the job of coordinating the deportation of the European Jewish to these camps.

On January 20, 1942, Heydrich invited senior officials from state and party offices to a conference in Wannsee, Berlin. He revealed to them his plan for the "Final Solution," which included Europe being "combed through from west to east for the Jewish." According to Heydrich, these eleven million Jewish would be held in transit ghettos, then sent east to form work gangs to build roads. Many would "doubtless …fall away through natural reduction" and those who survived would "be dealt with appropriately." Heydrich did not mention the fate of the Jewish who were not fit to work, but according to attendee Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's murderous intentions were obvious and understood.

Membership

Reinhard Heydrich was a member of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund.

• Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund , Germany

Personality

According to his friend, Walter Schellenberg, "Heydrich's only weakness was his ungovernable sexual appetite. To this, he would surrender himself without inhibition or caution, and the calculated control which characterized him in everything he did, left him completely." In December 1930 he became engaged to Lina von Osten. As Adrian Weale has pointed out: "Lina von Osten, the beautiful, blonde, nineteen-year-old daughter of a schoolteacher from the island of Fehmarn, in the Baltic. Shortly thereafter, though, a previous girlfriend appeared and claimed he had already proposed to her - after they had spent the night together in a hotel." Heydrich vigorously refuted the woman's claims, but her father, a successful shipbuilder, complained to the Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, and in May 1931 a Naval Court of Honour was convened to examine Heydrich's behavior. Although he defended himself before the court with a "confidence that bordered on arrogance" he was dismissed for "impropriety." Heydrich's dismissal came when he was just a few weeks short of being eligible for a naval pension. Heydrich later claimed that he had been dismissed on "political grounds." For relaxation Heydrich loved to read detective and spy thrillers.

Physical Characteristics: With the help of his wife's family friend, Karl von Eberstein, Heydrich was able to obtain a meeting with Heinrich Himmler. It has been claimed that he was impressed by Heydrich's "Nordic" appearance. However, Karl Wolff, claims this was not true as he was considered "womanly and unGermanic." Peter Padfield, the author of Himmler: Reichsfuhrer S.S. (1991), agrees: "Heydrich fell short of the strict Nordic ideal; his hips were too wide. There was also a Mongolian cast to his eyes which caused Himmler when annoyed to rebuke him with descent from the hordes of Genghis Khan. It was an apt comment. Even his photographs convey an impression of cruelty; the long, asymmetric face, thick lips and slightly inclined, icy grey-blue eyes suggest something both infinitely calculating and diabolic."

Heydrich had a serious illness as a child. At around six months old he suffered an inflammation of the brain that endangered his life, and this was followed by a succession of other illnesses. To overcome this, his father encouraged him to take up as many sports as possible, including running, horse-riding, football, swimming, and fencing. 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. At the same time, he had a remarkably high-pitched, squeaky voice, which was the reason he often refused to speak in public.

Interests

• violin, porcelain

• Politicians

  Adolf Hitler

• Writers

  Agatha Christie

• Artists

  Ottmar Obermaier

• Sport & Clubs

  fencing, swimming, horse-riding

• Music & Bands

  Franz Peter Schubert

Connections

On December 26, 1931, Reinhard Heydrich married Lina von Osten. Lina Heydrich gave birth to three children over the next few years: Klaus (17th June 1933), Heider (23rd December 1934), and Silke (9th April 1939). Lina found life with Reinhard Heydrich difficult: "The most characteristic trait was that he (Reinhard Heydrich) was a man of few words. He never talked about something or discussed something just for the love of talk. Every word had to have a concrete meaning, or purpose had to hit the point. Therefore he never said even one word more than necessary. My husband was vain. He hated nothing more than to be dressed inadequately. That did not apply to his wife. She might have worn the most impossible dresses, he thought them all right."

Father:

Richard Heydrich

Mother:

Elisabeth Anna Maria Amalia Krantz

Brother:

Heinz Heydrich

Heinz Heydrich was Reinhard Heydrich's younger brother and an SS lieutenant. His immense pride in his older brother’s high rank changed in 1942 after Reinhard’s death following an ambush in Czechoslovakia by resistance-fighters. Among the personal effects that Heinz received before Reinhard’s state funeral was a bundle of his personal papers, which included details about the ‘Final Solution' - the systematic extermination of the Jewish.

Heinz Heydrich was horrified. He burned the papers and resolved to use the influence of the Heydrich name to secretly help as many Jewish as possible to escape from Germany. As a journalist and publisher of the soldiers’ newspaper, Die Panzerfaust, he had access to a commercial printing-press which he used to print forged travel-documents to give to Jewish families.

His secret work continued for two years but was undone by a state attorney’s investigation at the newspaper offices in November 1944. Terrified that he had been found out and of the repercussions for his wife and 5 children, Heinz committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. In fact, the state attorney hadn’t suspected a thing. His commission was merely to investigate paper shortages.

Wife:

Lina von Osten

Son:

Klaus Heydrich

Son:

Heider Heydrich

Daughter:

Silke Heydrich

Daughter:

Marte Heydrich

Acquaintance:

Adolf Hitler

Acquaintance:

Heinrich Himmler

Several writers have tried to explain the relationship between Heydrich and Himmler. Peter Padfield, the author of Himmler: Reichsfuhrer S.S. (1991) has argued: "To judge from letters and reports which they exchanged, the partnership was one of mutual trust and on Himmler's part affection. Himmler treated his protégé with special consideration and fondness. Both men were too complicated to conform to such a simple analysis. Both were driven characters with deep-seated childhood complexes of inadequacy and they operated within a shifting minefield of power rivalries; neither was what he seemed. Himmler and Heydrich were a partnership and after more than a decade of success that virtually molded the Nazi revolution they knew each other's strengths and weaknesses and each his position vis-a-vis the other as intimately as the partners in a marriage; as in a marriage no doubt the relationship changed and shifted subtly from time to time."

Michael Burleigh, the author of The Third Reich: A New History (2001) claimed that the SS was "Himmler's mind projected on an institutional canvas, while the operational style largely derived from Heydrich. Himmler's more outre obsessions should not distract from his manifestly astute grasp of how this highly chaotic and protean political system worked. Routinely out-maneuvering his foes, his empire spread between the interstices of state, Party and army, throughout Germany, and then across the whole of occupied Europe. His manner may have been distracted and unassuming, but the coldness, moralizing, prying, and suspicion kept him in absolute control of subordinates, whose own utter ruthlessness was accompanied by human frailties which Himmler lacked."

Richard Evans argues that Heydrich "became perhaps more universally and cordially feared and disliked than any other leading figure in the Nazi regime" and had the qualities that Himmler needed: "Unsentimental, cold, efficient, power-hungry and utterly convinced that the end justified the means, he soon won Himmler over to his ambitious vision of the SS and its Security Service as the core of a comprehensive new system of policing and control. on 9 March 1933, the two men took over the Bavarian police service, making the political section autonomous and moving SS Security Service personnel into some of the key posts. They went on to take over the political police service in one federated state after another, with the backing of the centralizing Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick."

Walter Schellenberg who was able to observe both men at work has pointed out that Heydrich was the "hidden pivot around which the Nazi regime revolved. He was far superior to all his political colleagues and controlled them as he controlled the vast intelligence machine of the SD."

However, his wife, Lina Heydrich claimed that he an inferiority complex: "His apparent arrogance was no more than self-protection. Even with me, he expressed no kind word, no word of tenderness."

Acquaintance:

Adolf Eichmann

References

• Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich
  2020
• Heydrich: Dark Shadow of the SS
  2018
• The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich
  2007
• The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich: The SS "Butcher of Prague"
  2009
• Heydrich: The Face of Evil
  2006
• The Assassination of Heydrich: Hitler's Hangman and the Czech Resistance
  2012
• The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich: The Czech Resistance’s Killing of the Top Nazi Official during World War II
  2015
• Reinhard Heydrich: Architect of The Holocaust
  2012
• The life and times of Reinhard Heydrich
  1980
• Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher
  1976