refused to become ‘a sailing domestic for rich kids’.133 It is not known why
he did not jump at this opportunity, but the decisive reason appears to be
that he was unable to accept the loss of his social status as an officer, as he
confessed to his fiancée.134
In these circumstances, Reinhard’s mother seized the initiative and told
Heydrich’s godmother, Elise Baroness von Eberstein, of her son’s profes-
sional misfortunes. A formidable lady in her early sixties, the Baronness
and her husband, Major von Eberstein, had met the Heydrichs at a
concert in Hal e shortly after their arrival in the city and they became their
closest family friends, supporting the activities of the Conservatory
through significant donations.135 The Baronness immediately contacted
her son, Karl, who had joined the Nazi Party in the mid-1920s and had
already acquired a senior position as leader of the
Sturmabteilung
(Storm
Troopers, SA) in Munich, in order to see if he knew of any suitable vacan-
cies. Karl’s response was cautiously optimistic.136 Under the capable
leadership of Ernst Röhm, and benefiting from the rising number of
unemployed men in Germany, the SA had grown from just over 60,000
members in 1930 to more than 150,000 men the fol owing year. In
the civil war-like atmosphere of the early 1930s, when armed supporters
of the Nazis and their opponents clashed almost on a daily basis, former
officers like Heydrich, trained in military tactics, were a welcome addition
to the Nazis’ ranks. Yet while Heydrich’s mother and his fiancée were
excited by the prospect of a second career in uniform for Heydrich, he
himself appears to have had initial reservations, although Lina urged him
to examine this career option careful y.137 It was not until Eberstein
offered him the prospect of an ‘elevated position’ in the Nazi Party’s head-
quarters in Munich that Heydrich agreed to take this path. What
Eberstein had in mind was a position on the staff of Heinrich Himmler,
the then stil largely unknown head of the
Schutzstaffel
(Protection Squad,
SS), a tiny but elitist paramilitary formation subordinate to the SA leader-
ship of Ernst Röhm.138
Partly as a result of circumstances beyond his control – the military
court’s harsh decision to dismiss him from the navy, his family’s economic
misfortunes and the Great Depression more generally – and partly
because of his family connections and Lina’s firm commitment to the
Nazi cause, the previously largely apolitical Heydrich, who had never read
Mein Kampf
or even heard of the SS before, was about to enter the most
extreme paramilitary formation within Hitler’s movement. He followed
that path not out of deep ideological conviction, but because Nazism
offered him the opportunity to return to a structured life in uniform,
48
HITLER’S HANGMAN
providing along with it a sense of purpose and a way of regaining the
confidence of Lina and her family of devoted Nazis.
As a precondition for the new job, Heydrich had to join the Nazi Party,
which he did on 1 June 1931. His membership number, 544,916, did not
exactly make him an ‘Old Fighter’ of the Nazi movement, but he joined
early enough to avoid the suspicion of careerism with which post-1933
members were usually confronted. Heydrich urgently requested the two
letters of recommendation required for the vacancy. The first reference
came from Eberstein, who assured Himmler of Heydrich’s suitability:
‘Very good qualifications, extended overseas commands . . . Heydrich has
been dismissed from the navy due to minor personal differences. He will
receive his salary for two more years, so, for the time being, he could work
for the movement without pay.’ Either out of ignorance or to boost
Heydrich’s chances of securing the job, Eberstein added that Heydrich
had worked for ‘three years as an intelligence expert at the Admiral’s Staff
Division of the North Sea and Baltic station’.139 A second letter of recom-
mendation was submitted by Heydrich’s former commanding officer,
Captain Warzecha:
I have known the naval lieutenant Heydrich from the beginning of
his service with the Reichsmarine. I was his training officer for two
years during his cadet period and have had other opportunities to observe
his development as an officer. I am closely acquainted with the reasons
for his dismissal from the Navy. They do not prevent me from whole-
heartedly recommending Lieutenant Heydrich for any position that
may arise.140
Heydrich’s application, enhanced by Eberstein’s insistence that his
childhood friend was an expert in espionage, arrived at a good time as
Himmler was in the midst of setting up an SS intelligence service. In
the summer of 1931, prompted by the Nazi Party’s electoral successes
and a parallel influx of new members of often questionable loyalty to
the cause, Himmler felt an urgent need for the creation of such a service.
He rightly feared that some of the new SA and SS members stood in
the paid service of either the police or political opponents to act as
spies or agents provocateurs. He realized that he needed a suitably
trained officer on his Munich staff to address this problem. Having
heard from Eberstein of an ex-naval ‘intelligence’ officer who was
offering his services to the Nazi movement, he invited Heydrich for an
interview.141
Heydrich’s appointment with Himmler had already been set when
Eberstein telegraphed Heydrich from Munich to tell him that the SS
YO U N G R E I N H A R D
49
chief was ill. Heydrich was prepared to reschedule the appointment, but
Lina urged him to travel to Munich and meet with Himmler anyway.
How much this opportunity meant to Lina is clear from her memoirs, in
which, thirty-five years later, she described the day of the first meeting
between Heydrich and Himmler, 14 June 1931, as the ‘greatest moment
of my life, of our life’.142
C H A P T ER I I I
✦
Becoming Heydrich
A Second Chance
On 14 June 1931, shortly before noon, Heydrich arrived at
Munich Central Station. His childhood friend, Karl von Eberstein, met
him at the station and drove him to Himmler’s poultry farm in the Munich
suburb of Waldtrudering, where the Reich Leader SS was recovering from
the flu.1 The meeting was to prove a momentous one, the beginning of an
eleven-year relationship of close collaboration and mutual respect. Much
has been written since the Second World War about the alleged rivalry
between the two men and Heydrich’s apparent later attempts to sideline
Himmler in pursuit of total power.2 But the post-war testimonies of
former SS officers on which this interpretation was based are generally
unreliable and too narrowly focused on the apparent differences between
the ideologically driven ‘school master’ Himmler, whose physical appear-
ance stood in stark contrast to his own vision for the SS, and the coldly
rational and supposedly only career-driven Heydrich on the other. The key
witness to the myth of rivalry between the two men, Himmler’s masseur
Felix Kersten, alleged that next to the often indecisive and insecure Reich
Leader SS, Heydrich left the impression of being made of ‘sharpened steel’.
According to Kersten, only the ‘fact’ of Heydrich’s Jewish ancestry allowed
Himmler to keep his first lieutenant under control.3
In reality, their relationship was one of deep trust, complementary
talents and shared political convictions. Himmler, who was only four years
older than Heydrich, also came from an educated middle-class family, his
father being the director of one of Bavaria’s finest secondary schools, the
Wittelsbach Gymnasium. He had been called up for military service in
1917 and experienced the German collapse the following year as an officer
cadet in the army barracks at Regensburg. Himmler’s political awakening
occurred notably earlier than Heydrich’s: politicized by the war and its
B E C O M I N G H E Y D R I C H
51
inglorious end, he joined Freikorps to oppose the short-lived Munich
Council Republic in 1919 while simultaneously studying for his
Abitur
school-leaving certificate, which he obtained that same year. Between
1919 and 1922, he studied at Munich’s Technical University, earning a
diploma in agriculture. He worked for a year at a factory in Schleissheim
producing fertilizer from dung but was increasingly obsessed by politics.
Through old Freikorps contacts and his subsequent involvement in two
radical
völkisch
and anti-Semitic societies, the Artamanen League and the
Thule Society, Himmler became aware of the emerging Nazi Party, which
he joined in August 1923 and in whose ranks he participated in the
unsuccessful putsch in Munich that Hitler launched in November that
year. In the summer of 1924, while Hitler’s party was banned, Himmler
became secretary to Gregor Strasser – then the second most powerful man
in the Nazi Party and the leading proponent of the party’s National-
Bolshevik wing. While acting as Strasser’s propaganda chief, he travelled
by motorcycle all over Bavaria. His marriage in July 1928 to the nurse
Margarete Boden, seven years older than him, enabled him to purchase a
poultry smallholding in Waltrudering after Margarete had sold her share
in a nursing home in Berlin.4
Since assuming the leadership of the (then still tiny) SS in 1929,
Himmler’s desire to transform it into an organization for the racial elite
had been reflected in his introduction of physical selection criteria for his
men. He envisaged the ‘Aryan’ body as the perfection of an ideal state of
mankind that distinguished itself from ill and ‘inferior’ bodies. He desired
tall, blue-eyed men who could show family trees free of ‘inferior racial
origin’: the body was the place where one’s membership of the Aryan race
could be ‘verified’. Unsurprisingly, Himmler was very impressed by the
young applicant who presented himself on the afternoon of 14 June 1931.
Blond, blue-eyed and just over six foot tall, Heydrich even surpassed the
strict recruitment criteria for Hitler’s SS bodyguard, the elite ‘Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler’.5
Himmler told Heydrich about his plans to develop an intelligence
service within the SS. It was only at this point that they realized that
their meeting was based on a misunderstanding: Heydrich had been a
radio officer in the navy, not an intelligence officer.6 Undeterred by the
realization that the applicant in front of him lacked any previous qualifica-
tion for espionage work, Himmler asked Heydrich to sketch out an
organizational plan for an SS intelligence agency and gave him twenty
minutes to complete the task. Without any previous experience in the
field of espionage, Heydrich resorted to the minimal knowledge he had
gained from years of reading cheap crime fiction and spy novels, and
wrapped his suggestions for a future SS intelligence service in suitably
52
HITLER’S HANGMAN
military phraseology. His minimal knowledge of espionage appears to have
surpassed that of Himmler: the Reich Leader SS was impressed and hired
him in preference to a second applicant, a former police captain named
Horninger. Himmler’s instincts served him well. Horninger turned out to
be an agent of the Bavarian Political Police and was arrested after the
Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, later committing suicide in prison.7
Heydrich’s salary started at a modest 180 Reichsmarks per month –
more than Eberstein had suggested to Himmler in his reference but
significantly less than, for example, a skilled labourer in the chemical
industry (228 RM per month), a civil service trainee (244 RM) or even an
unskilled retail employee (228 RM) could expect to earn in 1931.8 The
fact that Heydrich chose this position in the SS instead of any of the
better-paid jobs that were on offer was due to a number of factors: his
desire to impress his wife and her family with a job in the political move-
ment they supported, the position’s quasi-military nature and the appeal
of a challenging new task in a revolutionary institution that rejected
the very political system which, from Heydrich’s point of view, had just
terminated his seemingly secure naval career.9
For the rest of Heydrich’s life, Himmler was his central ideological and
professional reference point, more so perhaps even than Hitler. Throughout
his career in the SS, Heydrich remained conscious of the debt he owed to
the Reich Leader SS and Himmler could rely on his unshakeable loyalty.