Army of Evil: A History of the SS (13 page)

Intelligence collection and reporting had been among the SS’s principal tasks ever since its foundation, but prior to Himmler’s elevation to National Leader it had not been centralised. Instead, the SS had relied on local commanders and their subordinates to collect and forward reports to the leadership on their own initiative. Consequently, the intelligence had usually comprised little more than general information, gossip and rumours about “enemies” of the movement. This can seldom have been of much practical use to the leadership, and it was certainly not “intelligence” in the accepted sense of the term.
*
Recognising this, in his reorganisation of the SS in 1929, Himmler specified that each local unit should include an “Ic” officer to coordinate the collection of information, analyse it, and only then forward it to headquarters.
†
Initially, the Ic was also obliged to act as adjutant to the unit commander, which suggests that intelligence collection was by no means seen as a top priority in the organisation.
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Then, in the summer of 1931, Himmler made one of the most important decisions of his first three years as National Leader: he recruited Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich as his Chief of Intelligence. At the post-war Nuremberg trials, Heydrich would assume the role of the ghost at the banquet: a Mephistophelean evil genius who escaped Allied justice by being assassinated in June 1942. In many respects, this assessment is perfectly fair, as Heydrich must bear much of the responsibility for one of the greatest crimes in history—the Holocaust. But it has made it difficult to understand what motivated this well-educated,
cultured, highly intelligent man to become—along with Himmler—one of the principal architects of the Third Reich’s machinery of political repression and, ultimately, genocide.

Heydrich was born on 7 March 1904 in Halle, Saxony, into a respectable, well-off, middle-class family. His father, Bruno, was a composer, opera singer and founder of the Halle conservatoire; his mother, Elisabeth, was an actress and pianist. Bruno was a fan of Wagner and sang at Bayreuth during the Wagner Festival. Later, he become acquainted with the composer’s widow, Cosima, who ran the festival. Reinhard inherited his parents’ musical talent: he learned the piano and violin from an early age, with his skill on the latter—which he continued to play throughout his life—being particularly notable.
⁴
He was also a dedicated sportsman. 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. He would eventually represent Germany as a fencer in the 1930s, in parallel with his career as the SS Intelligence Chief.

Heydrich’s family seems to have been strict and disciplinarian, but loving. His tall, stout father had a reputation as a joker, but he could also be pompous and overbearing, and he seems to have taken little interest in his children’s education. However, like Gebhard Himmler with his sons, he introduced them to German folk myths at an early age. There are many rumours—most of them unsubstantiated—about Heydrich’s youth and background. The majority of them seem to have gained momentum because of a supposition that he must have suffered some kind of childhood trauma which would explain—if not excuse—his later monstrosities. The most persistent of these—which caused him some problems even during his lifetime—was that Heydrich himself was of Jewish extraction. But this was not true. The confusion arose because Heydrich’s grandmother married a locksmith called Gustav Süss after her first husband, Bruno’s father, died. Süss
was a common German-Jewish name at the time,
*
although Gustav himself was not Jewish. Nevertheless, as Heydrich’s grandmother occasionally referred to herself as Frau Süss-Heydrich, people started to assume that the family, including Bruno, had Jewish blood. This was compounded in 1916 when that year’s edition of Riemann’s
Musiker-Lexicon
, a directory of German musicians, listed “Heydrich, Bruno
alias
Süss.”
⁵
The pro-nationalist Bruno insisted that the error must be corrected in future editions. Notwithstanding the rumours about his heritage, Heydrich satisfied both the NSDAP and the SS about his racial origins as early as 1932, after the matter had been brought to Himmler’s attention.

There is some anecdotal evidence that Heydrich was bullied at school because of his father’s alleged Jewishness, but it seems highly unlikely that this fuelled his later hatred of the whole Jewish race. In fact, he suffered much more teasing as a child because of his odd, high-pitched voice: he was known as “Hebbe” (Goat). He was also a solitary, arrogant young man who did not bond with his peers and even appeared to hold them in contempt. So, if he was traumatised by bullying at school, it seems that he largely brought it upon himself.

The family’s income declined steadily during the war as the number of students attending the conservatoire dropped off. Then they were caught up in the revolutionary upheaval that followed the armistice. Despite being only fifteen years old (and thus two years underage), Heydrich volunteered for service in the
Maercker
Free Corps in March 1919. He served as a messenger with both the Free Corps and the Halle Citizens’ Militia for more than a year while continuing his studies. Later, he joined another armed group, the extreme nationalist
Völkischer Schutz- und Trutzebund
(People’s Protection and Retaliation League), which was affiliated to the Thule Society. This affiliation
suggests that he leaned towards the extreme right on racial issues long before joining either the NSDAP or the SS.

Having graduated from Halle Grammar School, Heydrich entered the navy as an officer cadet in 1922. Part of his training took place aboard the cruiser
Berlin
, whose first officer at the time was Commander Wilhelm Canaris, who went on to become head of German Military Intelligence in 1935. Heydrich’s naval career initially followed a straightforward path. He was promoted to
Fähnrich zur See
(midshipman) in 1926 and
Leutnant zur See
(sub-lieutenant) later the same year. Then, after attending the Naval Signals School, he became a communications officer on board the
Schleswig-Holstein
, one of the few First World War–era battleships that the Allies had allowed Germany to keep. Thereafter, he was stationed in the communications division of the Baltic Naval Station at Kiel, but he may have had some connection with the intelligence branch of naval headquarters as well.
⁶

However, his naval career came to an abrupt end because of his private life. According to Walter Schellenberg, who later became head of the SS’s Foreign Intelligence Service, “Heydrich’s only weakness was his ungovernable sexual appetite. To this he would surrender himself without inhibition or caution and the calculated control which characterised him in everything he did left him completely.”
⁷
In December 1930, he became engaged to Lina von Osten, the beautiful, blond, 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 complained to the Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, and in early 1931 a Naval Court of Honour was convened to examine Heydrich’s behaviour. The standard version is that Heydrich defended himself before the court with a confidence that bordered on arrogance—to the point where he was reprimanded for insubordination—and was subsequently dismissed for “impropriety.” However, Peter Padfield argues
that it would have been highly unlikely for a promising young naval officer to be dismissed merely because he had betrayed one girl for another. Instead, he suggests two alternatives: that Heydrich was planted by Naval Intelligence into the SS in order to monitor the activities of the National Socialist movement from the heart of its new “police” branch; or that he was genuinely dismissed, but because he was already involved in National Socialist political activities.
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Unfortunately, neither of these theories is supported by any evidence. The proceedings of the court have not survived, and the spurned girl has never been positively identified. For what it is worth, Lina von Osten, whom Heydrich went on to marry and who lived into the 1980s, subsequently stated: “He was just a professional naval officer; he was wedded to his naval career. His only other interest was sport. He knew nothing about politics—and had never shown any great interest in them.”
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This can be taken with a large pinch of salt, though, because von Osten was an enthusiastic National Socialist at the time and it was she who led him into the party. Interestingly, despite the immense power that he wielded later, Heydrich never took action against the members of the court that ejected him from the navy.

Heydrich’s dismissal came when he was just a few weeks short of being eligible for a naval pension,
¹⁰
and there were few options for gainful employment in the harsh economic climate of May 1931. He explored the possibility of becoming a sailing instructor at a yacht club, then of joining the merchant navy, but neither appealed. Instead, at the prompting of his wife, he joined the naval branch of the SA and used a family contact to secure a paid position within the NSDAP. That contact was Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein, the son of Heydrich’s godmother. Von Eberstein was ten years older than Heydrich and had had a distinguished career as a reserve officer during the First World War before becoming a banker. He had originally joined the NSDAP as early as October 1922, and had rejoined soon after the party became legal again in 1925. In April 1929 he had been recruited by Himmler as one of the first SS officers; and two years
later he held the dual ranks of SS-company leader and SA-regimental leader as adjutant to the quartermaster of the SA High Command. Knowing that Himmler was expanding the SS, and perhaps seeing useful qualities in Heydrich, von Eberstein wrote to the National Leader to recommend Heydrich as a potential recruit.

In a speech in 1943, Himmler described how he selected Heydrich to be his chief of intelligence:

Nachrichten
is news, information or intelligence (the current German intelligence service is called the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
), but it is also the military term for communications, and Heydrich had trained as a technical signals officer.

Summoned to an interview at Himmler’s farm on 15 June, Himmler asked the younger man to outline how he would organise an intelligence branch for the SS. Despite his lack of practical intelligence experience, this was a straightforward task for a professionally trained naval officer and Himmler gave Heydrich the job more or less on the spot. Heydrich returned home to Hamburg to prepare for his new job. He was appointed to Himmler’s personal staff as a company leader on 10 August; then, after relocating to Munich, he set to work on the SS’s existing intelligence files. At this stage, he had no role in collecting or directing the intelligence-collection efforts of the local SS units. Rather, he simply collated any material that was passed to him by Himmler’s adjutant, Waldeck-Pyrmont.
¹²

But Heydrich was an opportunist, and he was quick to see the advantages that his position gave him within a movement that, to some
extent, defined itself by its enemies, both real and imagined. According to George Browder, “Heydrich built his authority upon an ability to paint two pictures convincingly. He depicted first the Movement, then the national community, as surrounded and penetrated by enemies, successfully camouflaging themselves as loyalists.”
¹³
Heydrich developed a vision of the
Ic-Dienst
(Intelligence Service) as an instrument of surveillance over all aspects of German national life, guaranteeing the total dominance of the National Socialist Party, and he convinced Himmler of the merit of this idea. Nevertheless, it started in a very limited way. The Intelligence Service was no more than a staff branch within the main SS headquarters in Munich, linked to intelligence officers in subordinate SS headquarters.

But Heydrich worked hard over the next two years to develop his organisation, partly by forging an extremely close working relationship with Himmler. There was never any doubt about who was in charge, though: Heydrich was always remarkably formal and deferential towards Himmler. In return, Heydrich’s work was highly valued by Himmler, who started to receive ever more information about potential enemies both within and outside the National Socialist movement. Thus, when Himmler was put in charge of the Munich Police, naturally he took Heydrich with him.

A
S SOON AS
he became Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Hitler prevailed upon President Hindenburg to call new elections. Through these, he hoped to gain enough strength in the Reichstag to pass an Enabling Act, which would allow him to rule by decree. The elections were set for 5 March. During the campaign, the NSDAP fully exploited the fact that they now had some control over the state’s machinery of government. On 22 February, Prussian Minister of the Interior Goering established a 50,000-strong auxiliary police force, including 25,000 SA members and 15,000 SS men.
¹⁴
This both legitimised National Socialist terror against their political opponents—especially
the Social Democrats and the Communists—and shifted the burden for funding a significant section of the NSDAP’s paramilitary machine from the party to the state. The National Socialists justified the creation of this auxiliary force by claiming it was needed to forestall an imminent revolt from the left. Of course, this only heightened the atmosphere of hysteria among the electorate, which further boosted support for the NSDAP.