Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (40 page)

According to his wife, Lina, of all the many enemies of Nazism, Heydrich “considered the Church the most dangerous.”
¹¹
His hatred toward Catholics was important in his goal to murder, first, all Polish Catholic priests and, then, Polish Catholic intellectuals and others.

Historian Richard Steigmann-Gall calls Heydrich the most important anti-Christian in Nazi Germany besides Himmler and, of course, Hitler.
¹²
Steigmann-Gall concluded that Catholicism was the Nazis’ major political opponent and for this reason “was at the forefront of most anticlerical actions taken by the Nazi state.”
¹³

In his book,
The Fortunes of Our Struggle
, Heydrich argued that all opposition to Nazism ultimately originated from either Jews or “politically active Christian clergy,” by which Heydrich meant those clergy or laymen who opposed Nazism or its policies, especially the Nazi policies opposing Jews. He once commented that “Pope Pius XII was a greater enemy of the Third Reich than either British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
¹⁴

To achieve his goals against both the church and the “inferior races” Heydrich established a nationwide network of informers to ensure that his policies noted above were carried out. Any comment that opposed Heydrich, even to neighbours or friends, could be reported and the non-conformist would most certainly suffer serious repercussions.
¹⁵
Because Heydrich “was more openly hostile to the churches [than other leading Nazis] and advocated breaking them as swiftly as possible by direct persecution,” his spy network rendered their opposition largely ineffective.
¹⁶
As a result, the opposition by the churches, Christians and others was often effectively put down.

HEYDRICH’S ANCESTRY QUESTIONED

One problem Heydrich faced was the claim that his father, Bruno Heydrich, was a Jew.
¹⁷
This allegation was found to be false, but rumours persisted. Historian Edouard Calic notes that, despite the recurrent rumours about his Jewish ancestry, evidently with little hard evidence,

Hitler decided not to force Heydrich out of the Nazi Party. Hitler described the six-foot-tall Nazi as “a highly gifted but also very dangerous man, whose gifts the movement had to retain…[because he will be grateful that we did not expel him and he will] obey blindly.” Always haunted by the ever-present rumors that he might be Jewish, Heydrich’s hatred toward the Jews grew even stronger. He also was tormented by a severe lack of self-esteem. One story tells of his returning home one night, drunk, seeing himself in the mirror, and using his pistol to shoot at his own reflection, shouting “filthy Jew.”
¹⁸

The threat by Hitler to keep Heydrich in line worked exceptionally well. Heydrich became a fanatical Nazi and loyal Hitler disciple.

HEYDRICH MOVES GERMANY TOWARD THE HOLOCAUST

An important step toward the Holocaust was the establishment of creative measures to apply Darwinian eugenics that included

racial hygiene, eugenic choice of marriage partners, the breeding of human beings by the methods of selection on the one hand and extirpation on the other. The guiding aide of the “race-attached soul” made all cultural and creative achievements dependent on external appearance and at the same time linked the ability and hence the right to found states and empires.
¹⁹

Fest noted that behind these programmes was the vision of creating a “people of pure blood,” which was described by race theorist Hans F.K. Günther as men who were

“blond, tall, long-skulled, with narrow faces, pronounced chins, narrow noses with a high bridge, soft fair hair, widely spaced pale-coloured eyes, pinky-white skin colour.” The efficacy of this racial image, however, was so repeatedly undermined—particularly by the physical appearance of most of the leading National Socialists—that it must not be seen as too binding. Yet there were frequent attempts to reconcile the leaders of the Third Reich to this racial picture, some of them so outrageous as to be comic.
²⁰

The motive for solving the Jewish “problem” was based on the fact that the Nazi

race theory contained a utopian element that gnawed into the ideology of Hitler and his closer followers with the force and exclusiveness of an obsession. Hitler was influenced above all by the theories of the nineteenth-century social Darwinist school, whose conception of man as biological material was bound up with impulses toward a planned society. He was convinced that the [Aryan] race was disintegrating, deteriorating through faulty breeding as a result of a liberally tinged promiscuity that was vitiating the nation’s blood.
²¹

The “useless eaters” and those the eugenicists regarded as inferior humans, including the Jews and Slavics, must all be eliminated because, as Heydrich explained, if any survived they would “form a new germ cell from which the Jewish race would again arise. History teaches us that.”
²²
Some, such as Höhne, claimed that Heydrich did not personally hate Jews—“he was no racial fanatic”—but was just doing his job.
²³

Others have argued, with much justification, that Heydrich did his job far too well for someone who did not have a strong personal commitment to the Nazi Darwinist goals. For example, Heydrich chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held near Berlin in what some claim was a confiscated home of a Jewish family, where they planned and implemented the rapid extermination by the gassing of all Jews in German-occupied territories. In 1941, Göring ordered Heydrich to develop a programme to resolve the

Jewish problem using any means available. Heydrich announced this at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January, 1942, using it as a carte blanche from the movement’s leaders to proceed to annihilation. Goering was not present at the meeting, but was represented by his state secretary, Neumann. It was his wish that he be kept closely informed about the SS policy toward the Jews and it can be assumed that the SS carried out their tasks with Goering’s knowledge and blessings.
²⁴

Already by 1941, besides the elimination of many “inferior” humans including Asians, Slavs, Gypsies and German Jews, “Heydrich informed the Führer that 363,211 other Jews had been killed.”
²⁵
After Germany invaded Poland, Heydrich organized the killing of various racial groups including Jews, Catholic clergy and others the Nazis judged as undesirable.
²⁶
He had a list of 61,000 names slated for death and by 1939, about 50,000 Poles were murdered, including 7,000 Jews.

Next, the Soviet Union was targeted for racial eugenics. The purpose of invading the Soviet Union was to eliminate or subjugate the “inferior” Slavic humans and clear the way for German colonization of their land. When the Soviet invasion ended, over 20 million Soviets had been murdered, many in the effort to eliminate “inferior” races.
²⁷
To determine who was racially superior, “Heydrich appointed racial experts to examine all applicants for German citizenship.” These racial experts often were professors or university-trained eugenicists.

Although the “physical appearance of most of the leading national Socialists” did not fit the ideal blond, blue-eyed Aryan racial character “Reinhard Heydrich seemed to be the exception.”
²⁸
Heydrich looked like an Aryan because he “was tall, blond, athletic, and combined high intelligence with a metallic streak in his nature which was regarded as proof of a special racial grace.”
²⁹

Heydrich may have looked like the Nazi racial ideal, but inside he was a “nervously irritable individual, subject to secret anxieties and continually plagued by tension, bitterness and self-hatred.”
³⁰
Höhne described Heydrich as one of the “radical, merciless rebels against tradition, morality and all humanitarian rules of conduct.”
³¹
The Nazi ideal was very superficial, at least for some of the leading Nazis such as Heydrich.

HEYDRICH’S END

Heydrich’s personality and policies engendered the enmity of an enormous number of people, resulting in an assassination attempt by several Czechs on May 29, 1942 in a suburb of Prague called Kobylisy. At the time, Heydrich was driving in an open car to his new country estate and was injured in the attempt. He eventually succumbed to his injuries and died on June 5, 1942.
³²
The Nazis gave Heydrich an elaborate funeral and showered many accolades upon him.

Even after his death, Heydrich was the cause of enormous suffering and the murder of many innocent people. For example, in retaliation for his death, Hitler ordered the execution of 10,000 randomly selected Czechs that lived in the villages that sheltered the underground operatives who assassinated Heydrich. His staff, recognizing that this response would alienate many of his Czech supporters, convinced Hitler to respond less irrationally. Nonetheless, the Nazi retaliation still was brutal, and close to

13,000 people were arrested, deported, imprisoned, or killed. On 10 June [1942] all males over the age of 16 in the village of Lidice, 22 km north-west of Prague, and another village, Lezáky, were murdered. The towns were burned and the ruins leveled…. Among those tortured and killed was Bishop Gorazd, who is now revered as a martyr of the Orthodox Church.
³³

Hitler fumed that men as important to the Reich as Heydrich should not be “driving in an open, unarmored vehicle or walking about the streets of Prague unguarded,” behavior that Hitler said is “just damned stupidity, which serves the country not one whit.” Hitler added that a Nazi “as irreplaceable as Heydrich should” never have exposed himself to unnecessary danger as he did which was “stupid and idiotic” because men

like Heydrich should know that they are eternally being stalked like game, and that there are any number of people just waiting for the chance to kill them.… So long as conditions in our territories remain unstable, and until the German people has [
sic
] been completely purged of the foreign rabble, our public men must exercise the greatest care for their safety.
³⁴

Three years later, the Nazis were defeated, their leaders who were still alive were tried as war criminals and many were hung in Nuremberg. Although Heydrich was never brought to trial for his crimes, he has been justly condemned by society ever since, and his inclusion in this book is one example.

SUMMARY

Reinhard Heydrich was the chief organizer of Nazi Germany’s plan to murder all European Jews and other inferior races. He was one of the few high-level Nazis who physically looked like the “ideal” German, yet was once accused by his enemies of being a Jew. He worked within the system, conforming to the Nazi culture to the extent of heading the Wannsee Conference that “resolved the Jewish problem” by planning their extermination.
³⁵
The critical influence of eugenics and the influence of the prevailing Darwinist culture on his beliefs is well documented.

_______________

1
Edouard Calic,
Reinhard Heydrich: The Chilling Story of the Man Who Masterminded the Nazi Death Camps
, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 214.

2
Joachim C. Fest,
The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership
(New York: Pantheon, 1970), 98.

3
Calic,
Reinhard Heydrich
, 235.

4
Calic,
Reinhard Heydrich
, 215.

5
Fest,
The Face of the Third Reich
, 98.

6
Fest,
The Face of the Third Reich
, 99.

7
Calic,
Reinhard Heydrich
, 215.

8
Mario R. Dederichs,
Heydrich: The Face of Evil
(London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 74

9
Dederichs,
Heydrich: The Face of Evil
, 75.

10
John S. Conway,
The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945
(New York: Basic Books, 1968), 287.

11
Dederichs,
Heydrich: The Face of Evil
, 75.

12
Richard Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133.

13
Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich
, 133.

14
Cited in Brenda Ralph Lewis,
A Dark History: The Popes: Vice, Murder, and Corruption in the Vatican
(New York: Metro Books, 2011), 226.